


everything wrong with me, and then some

by ungoodpirate



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Dream Pack, Drug Use, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Language, Homophobic Language, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Toxic Relationships, Underage Drinking, background blusey, not role model behavior, one-sided Kavinsky/Ronan, pynch - Freeform, still magic, ultimately a pynch story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-07-01 17:08:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15778413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: “So…” he said, rolling the bottle neck loose between his fingers. “You and Kavinsky are… boyfriends?”Parrish swallowed his mouthful. “Boyfriends is… generous terminology.” It came out laced with the local accent that Ronan recognized but hadn’t really appreciated before. Parrish shrugged. “We fool around.”---Ch 12 preview:He said fine. The kiss was fine. Being kissed was fine. Like it wasn’t just a first, new, explosive experience. Like it wasn’t a culmination -- tension fulfilled. Like Ronan Lynch hadn’t just felt his metaphysical concept of a soul -- which many doubted existed -- lift from his body. Fine.





	1. Chapter 1

It was a bad night, the first anniversary of Dad’s death, that Ronan found himself at Kavinsky’s house. It had been a while since their interactions had been more than Kavinsky pulling up beside him in his white mitsubishi and Ronan beating his punk ass in an impromptu drag race. That’s how he preferred Kavinsky, with the metal shell of cars between them. Without that separation, it was just skin and bones and whatever hateful words they had for each other -- and it was something distinctly more dangerous than any reckless drive.  

Tonight, Ronan wanted to be very reckless. 

At Kavinsky's house, it was just Kavinsky and his usual crew of cronies, lounged around in his home theater, getting drunk and high, while one of the Fast and Furious movies played out on the screen. Ronan could’ve rolled his eyes at the cliche of it. 

At his appearance, Kavinsky just shoved a handle of Jack into Ronan’s hand, not saying anything shitty enough to make Ronan want to throw a punch. And he was fucking primed to throw a punch. With Declan’s shit, and the way Matthew moped around school today, and Gansey’s over-attentive, pitying looks. Yeah, Ronan was ready for a fight. But he was ready for a drink first. 

He threw back his head for an ambitious gulp; it burned all the way down.  

“Take a fucking seat, Lynch. Stick around for a while.” Kavinsky took a fist of Ronan’s shirt and pulled him down. He must’ve already been buzzing high on something, because he was a lethargic set of bones sprawled across one and a half seats. And although the leather recliners outnumbered the crew twenty to one, Ronan ended sprawled on the seat beside Kavinsky, the fucker. 

“You want something better than that?” Kavinsky asked after Ronan took another hit from the Jack. He was offering whatever fucked up pills he had on him. 

Ronan, who preferred his poison in predictable doses, said, “Fuck off.” 

“He speaks!” Kavinsky rolled his head back to laugh. Where Ronan prefered silence and stares, Kavinsky liked to fill space with his own voice and force people to listen. 

About the time the Jack started to meld Ronan past tipsy, the doorbell chimed over whatever speakers was rigged up over the ugly-fuck McMasion of a house. 

“Go get that,” Kavinsky said with a vague gesture of his the arm, and when no one moved, he half turned in his seat, and said to the first person he laid eyes on: “Skov, you asshole, go get the fucking door.”

Skov left. On the screen, the camera panned over glorious angles of expensive cars with more expensive paint jobs. Ronan clutched the handle of Jack like it was a totem, taking occasional sips now that the first wave of mind-alteration had hit him. 

Skov returned. He caught eyes with Kavinsky and jutting his chin in the direction he’d just come. 

Hovering in doorway was a boy -- not one Ronan recognized from school -- in a rough set of jeans and a rougher t-shirt, all curled over shoulders, hands shoved in his pockets.   

Kavinsky’s eyes stuttered over the boy, then went back to the screen. But Ronan watched as the boy went through a private sort of war, shifting weight between his feet, before doubling down on the curled over shoulders thing and crossing the home theater, to sit down on Kavinsky’s other side. 

“Hey,” the boy said, loud enough to be heard over the movie, and loud enough for Ronan to overhear. “Can I crash here tonight?”

He had a molten bruise under one eye, a fresh one, one ripening to full color still. Ronan knew bruises. 

Whatever Kavinsky replied was lost in the overwhelming cacophony of an onscreen explosion exploded all the louder over a very expensive surround sound system. The boy flinched, a twitch of his shoulders. 

“Loosen up, Parrish,” Kavinsky said. “You’re no good to me all tense.” 

Ronan watched as Kavinsky laid his hand on Parrish’s jaw, his thumb skating over his bottom lip, then dragging it down, slipping inside, past teeth, to tongue. The other guys weren’t paying attention. Ronan checked. They were too out of it themselves to notice this too intense  and sensual moment, the two stuck in their own staring contest as Kavinsky pressed Parrish’s mouth open wider. With his other hand, he slipped a pill into the boy’s mouth. 

The boy leaned back in his chair, eyes shut, like waiting for whatever it was he took to overcome him. 

Maybe a quarter of an hour later, Kavinsky linked his fingers around the boy’s wrist and tugged him -- just as loose boned -- out of the room. 

Ronan turned around in his chair. “Who the hell is that?” Ronan asked of the lot of them. 

“Parrish,” Jiang said, like that was an answer. 

Useless motherfuckers. 

Ronan pushed up from his chair to go find Kavinsky. He was ready for that fight now. All the alcohol rushed to his head fast and he stumbled his first step, but regained it the next. It would take more than that to plateau him. 

Not familiar with Kavinsky’s house -- he’d only been there once before, and that once before it had been crowded with a party -- Ronan wandered around for a while, checking behind doors and skulking down hallways. 

When he lucked across the right door, jerking it open, hand gripped on the nob, it was the sight of Kavinsky back pressed against the wall and the new kid, Parrish, down on his knees in front of him. 

Kavinsky’s eyes slid open and caught Ronan there looking. He smirked. Ronan slammed the door shut. 

He’d been carrying the Jack with him the whole time, so he found a wall to lean on near a window, where outside the night was inky and misty-rain was gathering on the glass. 

Kavinsky strutted down the hall some fucking time later. 

“Did you need something,” he said. “Or did you just want to watch?” 

Ronan lowered the mouth of the bottle from him his lips. “After all the fucking times you called me a fag.” Something heated and unsteady pounded through his blood. 

“I’m the one getting my dick sucked.” He whacked Ronan in the middle of his chest with the back of his hand as he walked past. “Don’t be too jealous.” 

 

#

 

Ronan ended up not getting his fight, and replaced with a lot more liquor instead. He fell asleep crunched up in a leather seat in the entertainment center. He wasn’t the only one. Skov and Swan were snoring away in their own spots when he awoke the next morning, time absently strange. Head pounding now, it had been a trade off -- Ronan had drunk enough that he hadn’t dreamed. 

His phone buzzed in his jeans pocket, a reminder of what he was going to have to deal with when he got on with the rest of his day. But before that -- he stretched out his cramped up muscles -- he was thirsty.

He remembered where the kitchen was from his last night wanderings. Someone was already there when he arrived under the archway.  

Parrish. In the kitchen. Elbows propped up on the marble countertop, looking like dusty-townie smudge on the otherwise impeccable white and marble design. He was eating a sandwich, a bread crumb hanging at the corner of his lips as he chewed. 

Ronan crossed the space, yanking open the door of the oversized stainless steel fridge. It was sparsely filled, but Ronan spied the beer bottles right away. Sometimes the best way to fight a hangover was to keep feeding it. He grabbed one, slammed the door right after. Being a twist off made it easy. He flicked the bottle cap, and it clattered somewhere on the tiled floor behind him. 

“It’s eight in the morning,” Parish said, eyes watching as Ronan threw back his head to take a gulp.  

Ronan lowered the bottle. “Did I ask your opinion?” 

Parrish’s eyes skated away. Ronan had been right: the bruise was worse this morning. 

Ronan leaned on the opposing side of the counter, cricked his neck. He took another hefty swig leaving the bottle already half empty. 

“So…” he said, rolling the bottle neck loose between his fingers. “You and Kavinsky are… boyfriends?” 

Parrish swallowed his mouthful. “Boyfriends is… generous terminology.” It came out laced with the local accent that Ronan recognized but hadn’t really appreciated before. Parrish shrugged. “We fool around.” 

While Ronan was still trying to wrap his thoughts around all the things warring in his head, his phone buzzed again.

“Can you do me a favor?” Ronan slapped his phone down on the counter. “Can you text the asshole whose blowing my phone up that I’m still alive.” 

“Why can’t you do it?” 

“I hate phones,” Ronan said. “Anyone who has something to say to me can say it to my fucking face.” 

Parrish eyed him with an expression that clearly read bullshit, but he he picked up Ronan’s phone nonetheless. As he was fiddling with it a devious plan passed over him, and he aimed at camera at Ronan. Ronan noticed -- and scowled -- just in time for the picture to be snapped. 

“There,” Adama said, holding the phone back out. Ronan took it from him very carefully, making sure not to brush fingers and kind of wishing that it happened anyway. He regretfully checked the screen in time to see Gansey text back, ‘Who took that? Who’s with you?’  

Jesus Christ. It would’ve been better if Ronan had texted Gansey back himself. 

“Do you have a name?” Parrish asked, again the words rounded with an accent. 

Ronan eyed him for a second, from his choppy haircut to the mole right on the side of his chin and back to that bruise. 

“Lynch,” he answered. 

“Ah. So you’re Lynch.”

He said ‘Lynch’ like it was an answer to a riddle. 

Ronan glowered. Usually, with the right direction, with the right scowl, with the right intensity, a glower could get him what he wanted without any words added. 

“K talks about you a lot,” Parrish said, giving it. “Not nice things.”

“Well, K can keep his fucking mouth shut if he knows what’s good for him.”

Little bothered, Parrished replied evenly, “You can tell him that. I’m not gonna.”

#

 

Next Sunday found him at Kavinsky’s again. It was after Mass. He had shredded his suit jacket and his button down, leaving him in an undershirt and dress pants. Declan couldn’t just keep the quiet peace, leaving Matthew as a buffer between them both in the pew and in general. Naw, he had to open his big mouth and get all fired up and miserable in one go. So here Ronan was, begging for distraction.

He would get that fight. Some reverence distilled in him from years of religious observance kept him from quarreling on church property so he hadn’t been able to throw a fist at Declan. 

Ronan knew driving up, by the lack of some cars and the presence of one, that K was there but his crew wasn’t. What he didn’t expect, when Kavinsky let him in the front wearing nothing but loose hanging sweatpants and tank top, was for that Parrish guy to be asleep on the couch.

“Cigarette?” Kavinsky asked, tapping one of pack for himself. 

“No,” Ronan countered shortly. He had a preferred poison and cigarettes weren’t it. 

Kavinsky shrugged. He snatched up a lighter laying on an end table. Cigarette sticking out from between his lips, he lit it. For a moment, the angles of his face were tinted with orange light and it made the shape of him more dangerous and exact. 

Ronan dropped his attention back down to the sleeping boy. Parrish. The couch was large, but he was still curled in tight, like he wasn’t use to space. The bruise on his face was just a yellow splotch now, almost invisible except for if you looked. There were fresh ones ringing his forearms. 

“You should handle your toys nicer,” Ronan said.  

Not even removing his cigarette, Kavinsky replied, “Those aren’t from me.”  He released a smooth, nicotine-infused breath. Ronan stepped back, like he hated the smell. When he really didn’t think it was so bad. 

Parrish hadn’t shifted in his seat even though they were standing over him talking. 

“What’d you give him?” Ronan asked, believing this to only be the sleep of heavily-drugged. He rarely had fitless sleep and neither did his roommate. 

“Nothing,” K replied. “He’s just fucking sleeping. Here -- “ He slid down to the floor, sitting cross-legged beside the sleeping boy. He tapped Parrish on the side of the face with the flat of his fingers. 

“Eh, Parrish, wake up.”

Parrish’s face pinched, entirely inward, between the brows, around his nose. His lids drew open with reluctant weight. 

“What?” he asked, all drowsy. 

Kavinsky removed the cigarette from his mouth and this should’ve been enough of sign that he was up to something. 

Ronan didn’t know much about kissing, but he knew enough about Kavinsky and his bravado to know it was a show. More evidence -- Parrish’s little ‘umph’ of surprise as Kavinsky pulled his him into a sudden, open-mouthed kiss. 

“What the fuck?” Parrish said, once he had use of his own mouth back in his solitary control. He was a little more awake, but everything was still tinged weary.

“Company,” Kavinsky said, easing onto his knees then onto his feet. 

Parrish eyes found Ronan -- standing statue-still and awkward -- in the room. 

“What the hell, K!” he startled, pushing up on his elbows and then flinching at the sudden movement. Pink flushed under his face. 

Kavinsky threw an arm over Ronan’s shoulder, his elbows crooking at the back of his neck. He was already over this, tugging Ronan in a subtle direction that was distinctly out of the room. 

Kavinsky’s skin was too hot against Ronan’s own, but he was too paralyzed to roll off the touch.    

“He’s already seen more than that already,” Kavinsky threw over his shoulder. “You were just too out of it to notice. Now go back to sleep, loser.”  

Kavinsky took them outside where their cars were, at the top of the long and elaborate paved stone driveway. Kavinsky just smoked his cigarette while Ronan just skulked around pacing. He had been keyed up for a fight, but now he was keyed up in a different way.

“Got you hot and bothered over there, Lynch,” Kavinsky said, leaned against the side of his mitsubishi. 

“Fuck off,” Ronan said. 

Kavinsky’s eyebrows raised a twitch. “This is my house. If anyone needs to fuck off, it’s you.”  

Ronan scowled so much he could feel it in the stretch of his skin. He stopped beside his father’s BMW, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, and kicked the tire. Tough rubber against doc martins didn’t have much of a satisfying affect.

“Never seen two guys kiss before?” Kavinsky said, his voice a clear note even when Ronan refused him eye contact. “I mean -- This is bumfuck Virginia, so maybe not. But you gotta know how internet porn works.” 

“Shut up.” 

The words rang out as sharp as a gunshot -- clear, succinct, and loud. Echoing in air. 

Kavinsky just smirked. It was like the natural shape of his face. “I’ll remind you again, Lynch. You’re the one who fucking came here... Maybe one day you’ll figure out why.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Ronan couldn’t sleep properly for a week. For two. 

When he wasn’t having regular grade nightmares, he was having the nightmares that had him waking with iridescent glass thorns trailed wrapping up his forearms and a still beating heart gripped in his palm. And when he wasn’t having those, he was having a different variety of dreams that featured Kavinsky or Parrish or sometimes even Gansey. Sometimes it featured all three, one meddling into the other at indeterminate moments as per the way of dream logic.

These dreams left Ronan awake and sweat-browed and unable to go out of his bedroom to join Gansey in their shared in insomnia like he would other nights when plagued by wakefulness. It was worse when he knew Gansey was up because light leaked under the door or he overheard his quiet scuffling around. It was worse being lonely when you didn’t have to be lonely.  

 

#

 

Ronan fucked off for a good while. He hung around Monmouth more, instead of seeking out trouble in Kavinsky’s usually lurking places. Ronan was sure the rest of the small town was just as dangerous for possibly running into Parrish. Ronan knew the Aglionby asshole haunts, but not the routine for townies. Having to do their own grocery shopping meant Gansey and Ronan went into the parts of Henrietta that the Aglionby boarding school dipshits never even crossed into. 

He saw him one time, at a distance, when Ronan had stopped at a convenience store that sold him beer with his fake id. When he came back out to the parking lot, Parrish was about a block down on the other side of the street sidewalk, arguing with some short girl with crazy hair and about a half dozen leashed dogs. 

The only words he heard were the ones at the crescendo-ed end of the fight. The girl’s: “Just take it!” and Parrish snapped back: “Fine!” 

Ronan ducked into his car and pulled out onto the road heading in the opposite direction. 

One evening, Gansey gripped him by the shoulder, all ernest camaraderie like, and said, “I’m glad you’ve been doing better.” Ronan almost hated himself a little bit more than usual, leading Gansey on this lie of improvement. Ronan Lynch had been spiraling in other ways. His homebodyness had been the consequence of the one of three ways he dealt with his problems. One, avoidance. The other two were drinking and punching it in the face. 

Because progress was a lie and Ronan Lynch didn’t lie, when he caught word of a blowout party at Kavinsky’s, Ronan found his way there, breaking both his streak of no contact and Gansey’s faith with one big crash. 

This party wasn’t like one of K’s Fourth of July parties were they were outside with things to burn and things to blow up. It was a party in more of an average douchebag variety: kegs and liquor, lowlights and pounding garbage music that tipsy fuckers could get up and dance to. Attending were Aglionby trash and townies alike, because if you wanted girls at your party, you had to invite townies. Townies -- also -- made up a part of K’s customer base. Ronan had to wonder if someone like Skov or Swan talked K into this, or if had been devised more as a business venture for K’s dealing. 

It was the kind of party Ronan hated too. But it was also a party with enough people and low enough lighting and just enough inebriation that he could be here all night without being noticed.  

“This is fucking boring,” Ronan overheard K say, passing through a room that wreaked of marijuana smoke, where an assortment of people were laid like slugs, mellowed out, on various pieces of furniture, whether they were meant for laying humans or not. “Let’s get out the real stuff.” 

But Ronan wasn’t here for Kavinsky, so he slipped out of that room just as fast. 

He wouldn’t admit what he was looking for, even as he moved restless through the party. He took a solo cup of beer when it was shoved into his hands by someone who had stationed themselves as the kegmaster. It was knocked out of his hands four minutes later by a wayward excited elbow. Ronan stepped over the puddle and kept moving through the house.

He stopped when he found Parrish vomiting in the bathroom off a hallway off the kitchen where the party hadn’t quite inched yet. The door was left wide open, the lights bright on. Parrish was on his knees, curled over the bowl of the toilet. 

Despite himself -- or because this is unacknowledged exactly what he came here for -- Ronan stepped over the threshold and raised his voice to be heard over the music. “Fucking alright?”

Adam’s blown pupils swiveled to the corners of his eyes. “Do I look alright?” he said, but snappishness was cut off by another heave taking over his body, a convulsion that ended with him spitting bile into bowl. His hand fumbled for the lever.

“Should I go get your asshole boyfriend?” Ronan had just avoided Kavinsky, but he was prodding at something entirely different. 

Parrish snorted, his shoulder hitching. They were narrow and sharp through the worn thin fabric of his shirt.   

Parrish collapsed back against the bathtub. The bathroom -- on the first floor and near the kitchen -- was nowhere near a normal person would take a bath, but probably something about inflated property values coming from full baths and not half baths had been the deciding factor on this bullshit design feature. 

“I don’t think there’s anything left in me to throw up,” Parrish said. 

“That’s what happens when you...,” Ronan spied the bottle on the floor by Parrish’s knee. “Down half a bottle of vodka.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans because he couldn’t figure out what to do with them, and when he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands he usually found himself breaking stuff, and that wasn’t what he was going for tonight. 

Parrish dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. When he drew them away, they were bleary. 

“Close the door,” he said. “It’s so loud.”

Ronan half turned and slapped it closed before he thought enough about it. Here he was, door closed and him inside. If he had thought of it better, he should of closed it with him on the other side. 

“I hate drinking,” Adam groaned, head still in hands. 

“Then why’d you do it?”  

A snort. “Because I hate feeling more.” 

Ronan found that sentiment undeniably relatable. He slide down on the tile beside Parrish, leaning his back up against the side of the tube. He picked up the abandoned bottle of vodka. 

He raised it in the air by the neck. “You done with this?”

Parrish’s wrinkled up nose expression was reply enough. He probably wouldn’t be drinking vodka again for months after having experienced it in regurgitation.  

Ronan unscrewed the cap and took half a shots worth gulp. He grit his teeth at the burn. Vodka wasn’t his preferred drink, but he preferred it enough because it was right here on hand. 

Parrish hung the back of his head against the edge of the bathtub. “I hate parties,” he mumbled. “I hate this music. I hate this fucking town.” He had dipped into the slurring, sorrowful confessions of the drunk.

“Let me guess what else,” Ronan said. “You hate fucking vodka.”

Parrish made a sound that was a mutation of scoff and a wretch.

Ronan gritted through another gulp of said liquor. 

“You picked it,” he said, hoarse and judgemental. 

“Because my dad doesn’t drink it,” Parrish said, again one of those closed confessions that slipped out when drunk. “Can’t stand the smell of anything he does. Especially beer.” 

Ronan was quiet for a moment, but not a moment too long, saying, “Your loss.” 

Outside, the music shifted from one poppy-dance beat to another. 

“...Why’re you here?” No accusation. Just confused curiosity, maybe prodded along by the swimming head caused from too much alcohol.

Ronan didn’t like how bone-close it cut anyway though, so he said, “It’s a party, asshole.” 

“The party’s out there.” Parrish extended his arm and finger in an unsteady pint towards the closed door. “You’re here.” He followed the point by nudging his elbow into Ronan’s arm. It was the type of touchiness emboldened by inebrition. Ronan decided to allow it.

“Well, I fucking hate parties too,” Ronan said.

But Parrish wasn’t so drunk that this could get pulled over on him. 

“Then why are you here?” he repeated, slower and louder for emphasis. 

But his answer was the same as Adam had already supplied: “Because I hate feeling more.”   

 

#

 

Three quarters of an hour later, Ronan drank the bottle of vodka down another quarter, and Parrish had fallen asleep. In that time, Ronan had already cursed out three different people who had come pounding on the bathroom door for access, so he knew if he left now, it wouldn’t end with Parrish getting a peaceful night of sleep on the bathroom floor. So Ronan did what he had to do, not because he cared, but because the laws of drinking with people at parties meant you were shouldering a bit of responsibility for them, especially when you had the higher tolerance. 

So, Ronan wrapped an arm around Parrish’s middle and literary shouldered his weight. His vague plan -- vague because his thought process was smeared thin by alcohol too -- was to find his way back to K’s bedroom and drop Parrish off there. 

All plans were conveniently cut off by Kavinsky cutting them off in the front hall: “Lynch. You fucker. You’re here?” His eyes were red-rimmed and his pupils blown. He was baked, probably on multiple things.  

“Where do you want me to put your boy toy?” Ronan said. 

Kavinsky’s eyes went to the slumped over Parrish with less interest than they had landed on Ronan. “What’d ya do to him?” K asked, words fog-like in his mouth. 

“Did it to himself,” Ronan said. Parrish wasn’t that heavy, but his deadweight wore on his strength. In Ronan’s grip, he slide an inch lower to the ground. “Fucking lightweight.” 

“Yeah, he’s boring as shit.”

Ronan felt his mouth twist into a scowl. He stepped forward. If he had to shoulder past K on his way upstairs, so fucking be it. 

He was stopped by Kavinsky’s hand planted flat on the center of his chest. If Ronan hadn’t had his hands full, he wouldn’t shoved him into the horde of sycophants gathered around.

“Where the fuck you think you’re going, Lynch?”

“He’s not sleeping on me all fucking night,” Ronan said, although so far he decided it wasn’t all that fucking bad. “I’m taking him to your room.”

“In your dreams,” Kavinsky said, the ‘s’ turned in a dangerous hiss that seemed to imply something. Like Ronan had plans for Parrish in K’s bedroom, which was just messed up. The guy was out dead limp. 

“This way,” K said instead, turning, waving a hand over his head shoulder for Ronan to follow. Ronan could’ve decked him; he wasn’t K’s fucking errand boy. If this weighted body had belonged to Proko or Swan or one of the other cronies, he would’ve dropped the baggage there. But it wasn’t. It was Parrish and that was something else entirely. So he followed K, and it really was a stupid fucking McMasion with it’s nonsense layout and just two turns of curving halls they were in another wing of the house where the party hadn’t infected yet; K opened a door and the whole room -- some den-like thing with leather couches and empty built in bookcases -- was a step down. 

Ronan took Parrish right over to a couch and leveraged him down. A strange thought crossed his mind then.  

“Where’s your mom?” he asked K, who was slouching around still high as a fucker. 

“Knocked out on sleeping pills, locked in her room upstairs,” Kavinsky said, a little too matter-of-fact.

“You’re one messed up son of a bitch.”

“Like you have any room to talk, Lynch.”

Ronan looked at Adam slumped on the couch. “I’ll go get some water,” he said, because Parrish was going to need it when he woke up, and it seemed like a mission that would give him temporary purpose instead of standing alone in the room with K and Parrish feeling like his soul was going to rip itself out of his skin.  

He found his way to the kitchen okay, but the stupid layout of the house trumped his drunk ass on the way back with a bottle of water. When he made it back, the den door was cracked open, and he stutter stopped out there. He had walked in on something he hadn’t wanted to see last time he was in the goddamn house.   

Ronan watched through the crack. He could spy K and Parrish -- now semi-coherent -- sitting close in profile on the couch. It was quiet enough to overhear.

“I hate my life, K,” Parrish slurred. 

“Sing it, Parrish.” Kavinsky didn’t sound particularly sympathetic, but it was been disorienting to hear K sound anything other that his trademark smug.

“Hey, hey, hey…” Parrish repeated, building up to some profound drunken thought. “K, do you like me?”

Ronan watched as K lifted his hand to the side of Parrish’s face with a touch that was gentler than Ronan thought Kavinsky had ever touched anything in his life. Even his prized Mitsubishi didn’t get treated with such care. 

Of course, K had to ruin it by speaking. 

“I like your pretty little mouth.”

A huff. “Fucker...The rest of me?” 

Kavinsky dipped in, pressed his mouth against the mouth of Parrish that he claimed to admire. It was a much softer kiss than Ronan had witnessed before, possibly because K wasn’t aware of having anyone to show off or flaunt for. Ronan stood stiff. He was spellcast here as witness.

“That’s not an answer,” Parrish mumbled. 

“Do you like me?” Kavinsky said with a little bit of a sneer. 

Parrish was quiet.

“Yeah,” Kavinsky said, voice burning like whiskey. “That’s what I thought. Let’s not overcomplicate it.” 

Ronan wasn’t needed here, so he slipped away as easily as a shadow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the reaction from Chapter 1, I'm glad there are people out there who are intrigued with what I'm going for. So here's your chapter two. It was mostly written and just needed some polishing up before posting. I know my chapter 3 needs a lot more work, so I'm not sure when that will be up. Enjoy.


	3. Chapter 3

A car horn blared behind Ronan on the straight away where he idled at the red light. It only took a twitch of his eyes to rearview mirror to see who the culprit was. Joseph Kavinsky -- in his white Mitsubishi with that ridiculous, compensating decal on the side -- drew up beside him in the neighboring lane. 

As the passenger window glided down, Ronan was tempted to turn up his radio in obstination. He didn’t need to listen to K’s shit right now or ever. But he didn’t. He just left one arm cocked on his open window and the other resting, wrist on top of the steering wheel. 

“Today’s my day, bitch,” K called out, leaning towards his steering wheel to peer through open window at him. Ronan spared him a bare glance, reeving his BMW’s engine in response. But when he did glance, he spied Parrish plastered back against the passenger seat. 

The light turned to green, and the two of them were off. 

Wind whipped through the open window, battering Ronan’s eyes, his face, his eardrums. He heard it more than saw it when Kavinsky bungled the shift to third gear. He always bungled the shift to third gear, the fucker, and Ronan out stripped him, even though he was in a practical car and not a racing one. 

He slowed down just enough to make a screeching U-turn, and breaked where the Mitsubishi was pulled over on the side of the road. 

“I asked you not to do that while I was in your car,” Parrish said, stumbling out on the gravel shoulder, leaning over, hands pressing to his knees. 

“I do whatever the fuck I want in my car,” K said back. His driver’s side door was cocked open, but he hadn’t climbed out. 

“Fucking up the shift to third,” Ronan called out. That’s what the fuck he liked to do with this car.

“Lynch!” Kavinsky called back. “A bunch of us are meeting up at the lot. Like, now. You coming?”

“Why would I fucking go anywhere where I have to look at your fucking face?” Ronan countered. Nevermind, he turned his car around to have this conversation. That was a gloater’s rights. 

“See you there or I won’t,” Kavinsky said back, pulling his door back shut, like a punctuation to his bluff-call. To Parrish, he yelled, “Get in or I leave you.” 

But Parrish didn’t seem to hear him. He had a hand pressed hard to his temple as he faced away, face scrunched up. 

K tossed a cigarette he hanging languid from his mouth onto the gravel outside his window. 

To Ronan, he said, “You’ll give him a ride, won’t you, Lynch?” And with nothing further, swerved himself wildly onto the road, complete with a quick roaring engine and screeching tires.

Oh, damn, was Ronan going to a land a good right hook on that ass next time he was in arm’s length for calling out and using his better nature to make sure Ronan’s destination ended up being Kavinsky wanted it to be. 

“You alright?” he called out to Parrish. His hand lingered on the keys in the ignition, ready to turn the engine off and check on the guy in person. 

Parrish extended an arm and held up a pointer finger, the symbol for ‘give me a minute.’ In about minute he did straighten up and shuffle over to the car. His wrinkled face wasn’t completely unwrinkled yet. 

Ronan unlocked the passenger door and Parrish slipped inside. Buckling himself, Ronan’s heart picked up a strange pace. Not exactly racing, just not resting either. 

This was a surprisingly intimate situation to be in. Yeah, they had sat shoulder in a strange bathroom, but this was Ronan’s car -- his father’s car -- and the only people who had Ronan had given a ride in this car since his father’s death had been Gansey, Noah, and Matthew. People he cherished in that deep part of his spirit he didn’t have words for. 

“Sometimes I get… headaches,” Adam volunteered as excuse for his strange actions. He said ‘headaches’ in a way that wasn’t exactly like a truth or a lie. Like a riddle maybe. 

“Sure,” Ronan said. He rested his hand on the gearshift, but moved it not. 

“Not exactly headaches,” Parrish added. “More disoritenting than painful, but… whatever. You know where you’re going?”

Ronan snorted. “Yeah, I know where I’m going. I’ve known Kavinsky longer than you.” He shifted the BMW into drive and took to the road as proof. 

A little down the road, Parrish unwrinkled a little bit more as whatever headache-like thing that had overcome him drifted further away. “God,” he commented apropos of nothing except the way everyone in Kavinsky’s radius was affected by his brand of anti-charm. “He’s such an asshole.” 

“Why’re you dating him if you don’t even like him?” Ronan asked, using his insider information from the party, the interaction Parrish hadn’t know he had overheard. 

It was a bold question. Ronan could’ve just agreed, complete honestly, ‘yeah, fuck that guy.’ 

Parrish was quiet, and then countered, “Why do you hang out with him if you don’t even like him?”

“I don’t,” Ronan said. 

Parrish scoffed, because Ronan -- technically -- had been of late. 

“You’re not one of his customers,” Parrish said. “Neither am I. But it has to be something... Turns out how I see it, people needs things from other people, and sometimes you put up with the all the BS in the world to get those things.” 

It was Ronan’s turn to scoff. “So it’s a fucking strategic decision for you.”

“No,” he said. “And yes… But that’s life.”

“Not my life.” 

“Well, you’re rich,” Parrish said. “Rich assholes like you and K don’t have to think about how the rest of us have to plan to get anywhere with our lives.”

“Don’t -- don’t put me and Kavinsky together in a sentence like that.” 

Parrish didn’t say anything back, but Ronan kept glancing at him with the side of his vision. Parrish was fucking smug and content over there with what he had said, and with no need to debate Ronan on the point he’d just made. 

Where had this kid come from? And what was he doing wasting his time with a slug like K? Because today he wasn’t drugged or drunk or otherwise altered, and he was… 

But Ronan knew from his personal hellish soul that people altered themselves not because of what they seemed like on the outside, to others, but how they couldn’t stand the reflection of themselves in their own heads. 

They reached the vacant lot. Ronan pulled up beside K’s parked Mitsubishi. Parrish climbed out of the BMW and reached through the Mitsu’s open window to grab something from the floor. A book, it turned out. 

“Homework,” Parrish said to Ronan’s gaze. 

Ronan looked away. Homework. Who was this guy? 

K and his crew were having what for them was a mellow afternoon out, drinking beer around a trash fire and seeing how far they could toss their empty bottles and with how good of a crash. 

Ronan didn’t stay too long, and the whole time Parrish sat on the hood of the Mitsu reading with dedication. When Ronan got him his car to leave, Parrish asked him the time. Ronan gave it. Parrish shouted over to the fire, “K, you need to drive me to work!” 

Ronan pulled away before he could hear anymore. Before Kavinsky could drag him into chauffeuring service again. He had too much swirling around in his head already. 

 

#

 

“So there’s this old hiking path that’s not on any of the new maps that I have good gut feeling about. It run right through the heart of these forests, and I just got permission from the owners to hike there, so I was thinking this weekend… Ronan, are you paying attention?”

“Fuck no,” Ronan replied, which he thought was the height of irony. He had to be paying attention enough just to answer that. 

Gansey tapped his boat shoe-covered toes against the floor, considering possibilities of starting over or if it was even worth it. 

Ronan rolled a piece of quartz over in the sanctity of his closed palm. It was a dream thing he had woken up by accident with this morning. It was crystal, uneven in shape like you would expect from something out of nature, and milky white. Normal, except it seemed to glow from the inside. No, not seemed. It did impossibly glow from the inside like the many impossible things from inside his dreams did impossible things.

In his dream last night, he had been in darkness. Surrounding him was cricket song, the ocean-like crash of windswept tree leaves, and all the after night animal sounds would expect in dark hours. There had been no light: not moon or stars or any hint of civilization’s ambiance or even dancing lightening bugs. No light and so nothing to be seen. All that kept Ronan believing he was anywhere at all was the sounds, the smell of wet grass, and that there was something he was standing on beneath his feet. 

Then, through all of that, appeared a dim glow. He followed it to edge of a stream bank. Kneeling down there, he cupped his hands and lifted the crystal out of the shallow water. He woke with it gripped in his hands, palms still damp.

“What’s that?” asked Gansey, now, in the present. 

“Nothing,” Ronan said, and shoved it into his pants pocket to be forgotten. “Hiking. This weekend. Sure. Yeah. Whatever.” 

“I’ll come too,” said Noah, just a voice floating out of his own bedroom door. 

Ronan rolled his eyes. Noah was more flaky than Ronan was. 

“Are you sure you don’t have any…  _ plans _ ?” Gansey asked Ronan. 

Ronan narrowed his eyes. “The fuck you mean saying  _ plans _ like that?” 

“... You’ve been sending a lot of time out lately --” 

“-- Like it’s goddamn accusation. Fuck, Gansey, you’re not my keeper --”

“I didn’t say I was!” Gansey said, raising his voice a nominal amount and holding his hands up in a placating gesture. He released a gravel-ly type of sigh, running a hand through his hair -- the king exhausted. Gansey was so pristine on the outside that sometimes even Ronan -- who knew him best out of anyone -- slipped up and momentarily forgot that Gansey had all the hauntings of a cursed man too. 

“Let’s go to Nino’s,” Ronan said, in a sort of peace offering. Everyone liked pizza. And it wasn’t Ronan storming off, into his room or somewhere else. 

After a few shouts back and forth to the bedroom, Noah agreed that as long as he didn’t have to eat, he was coming too. So that was that, and a few minutes later they were piling into the Pig, which started pretty smoothly all things considered, and were on their way to dinner. It wasn’t like the had fucking actual food in Monmouth anyway. 

Of course, there was something else at Nino’s that Gansey really liked too. 

 

#

 

The waitress. Who was there working when they arrived and took their usual booth seat. She came over to their table, tapping her pen on her notepad, checked that there was no manager nearby, then said pleasantly, “What can I get you bastards today?” 

“Well, what’s the house speciality, Jane?” asked Gansey, addressing her by a name that wasn’t on her nametag, although it was still a more likely name than the one that was. 

“Pizza,” she replied. 

“You don’t say.” 

Ronan rolled his eyes at this familiar and nauseating banter, but did nothing more aggressive than that. He had, after all, suggested Nino’s as a peace offering. He had to deal with the goddamn consequences now, as torturous as they were.  

Eventually they ended up with some pizzas and drinks order. While they waited, Gansey was distracted by being in a romantic daze, Noah blew a straw wrapper from the end of his straw, and Ronan wondered why the waitress looked familiar other than she was their server two-thirds of the times they came in this joint. 

When she came back to the table with a round of Nino’s famously good iced tea’s, Ronan said, “Do you ever… walk dogs?”

“Ronan,” Gansey scolded, like he expected this as the set up a crude joke. If there was a crude joke that started this way that Gansey knew of, Ronan wanted to hear it. 

“Why?” the waitress Not-Jane countered easily. “Do you need walking?” Then to Gansey, even though he wasn’t the one to ask the question, she added, “It’s the second of five odd jobs I do as I’m just a humble member of the proletariat.” 

Gansey’s eyes gleamed underneath his glasses. 

Noah, who wasn’t under the same treaty terms as Ronan, took the moment to fake-gag. 

 

#

 

“I’m going out.” 

The trio of them had just gotten back from pizza an hour ago. Ronan had disappeared into his room right after and only came out now with his car keys slung around a finger. 

“Seriously?” Gansey said, cross-legged on the floor by the bank in his Henrietta model. His voice run disappointment because the sky was turning dark and Gansey didn’t trust what Ronan got up to in the dark when he was by himself. 

“Hiking. Saturday,” he said. A reminder of a promise. He wasn’t good at promises, but he didn’t lie. “But now…” he jutted a thumb at the door, and then follow in its direction. 

He went to Nino’s. He parked along the small road around back where the backdoor the employees went in and out of for breaks used. He waited until Not-Jane came out before climbing out of his car. He called out her name. Her real name, the one on her name tag. 

She blinked, looked at his confused and curious as he approached, hands stuffed in pockets. 

“I didn’t know any of you a-holes knew my actual name,” she said. 

“I know how read,” Ronan said with a nod at her nametag. 

“I only get fifteen minutes of fresh air for my break, so what’s up?” 

Ronan pressed his fist deeper into his pockets, fingers knotted tight. He said, “I need to ask you a favor?”

Again, her expression was a battle of curiosity and confusion. “You can ask,” she said hesitantly. “But I don’t I’m giving any guarantees until I hear it.” 

Ronan ground his teeth. Even with all the waiting, he hadn’t figured out the words to segue into it. Fuck it. He’d blurt it out. 

“You know Parrish?”

Her eyebrows dipped. “Adam?”

“Sure.” 

“Yeah, I know him,” she said. “In passing.” 

Jaw tense, Ronan nodded once. He had come here with the chaotic edges of a plan at best. It had been more impulse. 

He was kind of hoping she would just get chatty at this point and let something slip that he’d find useful. Apparently, instead, she wasn’t going to be easy. 

“What’d’ya know about him?”

She cocked her head. “Why?” 

“I saw you arguing with him in the street other day while --”

“While dog walking. Right.” She clicked her tongue. “I don’t know why you’d think I’d tell you other people’s business.”  

Ronan didn’t know why he had come here to ask. 

Not-Jane released an exhausted sigh. “I only have ten minutes of my break left. If I tell, will you leave me alone?” 

“Sure.” 

Another sigh. 

“My aunt’s been trying to get in contact with him. I’ve been tasked with… delivering messages.” 

“And why is your aunt doing that?” 

“Do you know anything about my family?” 

Ronan wrinkled his nose up. It was a shitty expression and he didn’t mind. “Why the fuck would know that?” 

“They sort of have a reputation around this town. As psychics. Either really good or really crazy… depending on who you ask.”

“And if I ask you?”

“Well, they’re my family. Of course I think they’re crazy.” 

 

#

 

It was something beyond him -- chance, fate, divine intervention, goddamn coincidence -- that had Ronan passing a biker on his drive back to Monmouth and even more having him taking that glance and noticing that the biker was none other than the man of the hour: Adam Parrish.  

Ronan pressed on his break and rolled down the wind as he drew up in slow speed beside him. 

“Doesn’t your boyfriend usually drive you?” he shouted out. 

Parrish stopped, leaning a foot into the gravel as he stayed straddled on the bike. Ronan braked the BMW to a jerking stop. 

“I’m not helpless,” Parrish called back.

“Did I fucking say that?” 

Ronan had a suspicion he had picked up on the tattered ends of someone else’s argument. 

Parrish was quiet. Lock-jawed. 

“Need a ride?”

“No.”

God fucking dammit. 

“Do you not need a ride because you’re not fucking helpless,” Ronan said, curling his fingers around the steering wheel. “But want one anyway?” 

The corner of Parrish’s mouth twitched. Then her replied with less bite:“...No.”

Ronan couldn’t laughed. That was a response born from pure stubbornness. He recognized that trait. 

Because they were at a standoff, paused in the middle of the middle of the road, waiting for one or the other to go off and get on first when going off was not what Ronan was aiming -- what was he aiming for? -- he tried something else. 

“You doing anything Saturday?”

“What?” Parrish said, pure stun. 

“My friends and I are going hiking. You want in?”

“Hiking?” He was more confused. 

A street light overhead stuttered on as the dusk grew just the right amount dark. 

“Hiking,” Ronan affirmed. 

Parrish blinked. “I’m busy. Work.” 

“Maybe next time,” Ronan said, feeling like he was channeling Gansey and his aloof charm. But Gansey’s type of charm didn’t hang on the shape of Ronan’s bones the same way, so this was layered with something edged and gravelly and veneer-stripped honest. 

“Sure,” Parrish said, like he still hadn’t worked out this puzzle. 

They had interacted just the two of them before, but this here was the first time it hadn’t been Kavinsky-adjacent. 

Ronan watched as Parrish bit his bottom lip in thought. Watched just that lip. 

“See you around?” Parrish offered back. 

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “Probably.” 


	4. Chapter 4

“You in?” Kavinsky said, as he lit up joint. 

“I don’t do your fucked up drugs,” Ronan replied. 

“This isn’t a fucked up drug,” Kavinsky said with a snort. “It’s pot. It’s less dangerous than alcohol.” He took a drag then casually passed the joint over to Proko. The joint made its way around the lopsided circle the asshats Ronan had found himself hanging out with again this afternoon. Swan and Skov were jamming their thumbs over xbox controllers and a game of GTA. They paused when the joint got to them. After that, it got to Ronan. He accepted it, but started at it -- the thin twisted wrapper and the smoldering end. It was a foreign object. 

“Lynch,” K croned. “Are you a pot virgin?” He said ‘virgin’ in a way that was a taunt. Ronan Lynch was a lot of things and easily provoked was definitely one of them. He raised the joint to his lips. 

It ended with hacking coughs and Kavinsky’s gleefully laugh.   

Ronan passed the joint off, not looking, but glad when it was taken off his hands. He laid back on the carpet, awaiting the effects from whatever he had managed to inhale. When Skov lost, bad, he tired to pass over the controller to Ronan for a turn. He flipped him off in rejection. He wasn’t here for games. He was here on reconnaissance. Because it had been a week and ‘see you later’ hadn’t emerged yet. And while Ronan didn’t know where Parrish was, he knew where Kavinsky skulked about.  

When Parrish finally showed up he started rifling through the piles of mail tossed in ceramic bowl on a spindly-legged table in the entry hall. 

“Any mail come for me?” Parrish asked, walking further into his room once he hadn’t found whatever he had been looking for. 

Jiang and Proko were distracted with their turn at GTA while the other losers handled the joint. Kavinsky, laid out on the couch, didn’t answer.  

Parrish repeated the question, louder. 

“You mean this mail?” Kavinsky pulled out a letter from under him. He climbed to his feet. 

In a few long, all-business strides, Parrish crossed the room to K and reached out for it, eager, but Kavinsky moved his arm back and up, holding it out reach, probably with no motivation other than to be a jackass. 

Parrish was taller than Kavinsky, with a longer arm reach, but what stubborn pride he had wouldn’t let him jump for it. 

In an under breath, he said, “K, come one.” 

Kavinsky wrapped his spare hand around the back of Parrish’s neck and yanked him in for a kiss that looking more bruising than anything else. 

Released, the letter was pressed into Parrish’s chest. He grabbed and grappled with it eager hands, ripping open the flap. Kavinsky -- collapsed back on the couch -- was already done paying attention. 

Ronan’s wasn’t. From his vantage on the floor, he watched as Parrish read whatever was inside that envelope, watched as his expression melted from hopefully to heartbroken. Watched as Adam slipped out of the room unnoticed. 

Except that Ronan noticed. 

He pushed up off the floor. 

“Where’s your punk ass going, Lynch?” Kavinsky said as he walked pass. 

“Going to take a piss. Piss off.” 

Jiang, truly high, giggled at the wordplay.

Ronan found Parrish in the kitchen, reading over that single page he had pulled from the envelope, jaw clenched. There was no way he wasn’t done his first read through, so Ronan recognized it for what it was. Self-torture. 

“What that’s?” Rona asked, with a jutting nod. 

Parrish startled. “Nothing,” he said. He folded the letter over quickly and stuffed it into one of his pockets. 

Ronan’s eyes dropped down to said pocket. “People don’t hide nothing.”

“I thought it would be something,” Parrish said. “But it turned out to be nothing.” 

Ronan shoved his hands in his pockets. His fingers bumped into a forgotten something. The quartz. He pulled it out. He set it on the marble countertop between them. 

“Here.”

Parrish looked at it, at him, at it. He reached out and picked it up. He turned the quartz crystal over in his hands, inspecting it in the very same way Ronan had days before. 

“What’s the gimmick?” he asked. 

“No gimmicks,” Ronan said. “I just found it. In a stream.” In a dream. 

“Rocks don’t glow like this. Shine, sure. Reflect. Not glow.” 

Ronan stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders. They didn’t come completely back down. This rock was solid evidence of the most secret part of him. Ronan Lynch didn’t often open himself for a goddamn inspection. 

“Here,” Parrish said, softer than Ronan had, holding the stone back out for him to take. His fingers were long, with prominent knuckles and calloused fingertips. 

“Keep it,” Ronan said. Did he want Parrish to keep it or was he afraid of touching fingertips by accident during the exchange? 

Parrish turned it over in his hand again and Ronan couldn’t stop staring. 

“I can’t,” he said. 

“It’s just a rock,” Ronan replied. Parrish didn’t seem all that eager to relinquish it anyway. 

The great interrupter, Joseph Kavinsky, sauntered into the room and the moment with commentary: “You two being lame shits in here without me?” 

Ronan: “Fuck off.” 

“It’s my house,” K said as he sidled up beside Parrish. Then, spying the quartz, “What’s that?” 

Ronan grit his teeth. This moment hadn’t been meant for fucking Joseph Kavinsky’s eyes. 

“Something Lynch found,” Parrish commented lightly.

Kavinsky threw a crooked arm around Parrish’s neck as he came aside him, as he looked down on the incriminating thing in Parrish’s hands. 

Bored by anything that wasn’t mind-altering or dangerous, or so Ronan estimated, his eyes glided over it and then up to him. But when Ronan caught his gaze -- because he was never one to look away from a stare down -- Kavinsky was very interested indeed. 

“Where’d you get something like that, Lynch?” he said, all fucking casual while his eyes were laser intense. 

“Found it,” Ronan grunted, words more an effort of force than sound. 

“Isn’t that fucking neat,” K said, all his words barbed with fake pleasantry. Then he said the damning thing. The thing that would keep Ronan up that night trying to figure out if it could possibly be. 

“Like something out of a dream.”

Ronan’s head jerked up. Kavinsky was staring at him straight. Unwavering. The skin around his eyes crinkled and the tip of his tongue was caught braced between teeth at the corner of his mouth. 

Parrish was nobody’s fucking idiot. Ronan could see the way he caught straight onto the shifting tension of the room. The way his spine went rigid. The way his eyes slide between the two of them. 

“Hey,” Parrish said in a low voice, turning inward towards his boyfriend. With a hand, he grabbed a fistful of K’s shirt down at the hem. “Let’s go to your room.” It was meant as a private statement, although Ronan was standing right there to overhear it. But more than private, it was defusion. Distraction. One of Parrish’s strategic moves. 

It worked. K dropped his staring contest with Ronan and his penetrating gaze went all distinguishing and leer-like as his attention shifted. 

“Fuck yeah,” he said.  

When they left the room, the dream quartz had been left on the marble countertop behind them. Ronan snatched it away from that place. He rolled it over in his hand once more, then dropped it in the stainless steel kitchen trash can three quarters filled with convenience food wrappers and half crushed beer cans. 

The entire drive home Ronan’s heart thudded in the hollow of his ribcage.  _ Dream. Dream. Dream.  _

There was no way Kavinsky could know. No one knew. Ronan hadn’t never shared this with a soul; Dad had sworn him to secrecy. 

_ Like something out of a dream. _ It was just something people said. Not something fuckboy supreme Joseph Kavinsky would say, but his tone had been irony laced. Making fun of him for his humble offering? Antagonist because he didn’t like something about Ronan and Parrish in the same room without him even though their had been a whole island cabinet between them? 

Or knowing something more than he should know?  

Ronan slammed the front door of Monmouth Manufacturing shut and stomped up the stairs, the physical action of making a lot of noise providing mild relief. When he got up to the main floor, Noah was laying spread-eagle in the middle of the floor. Gansey was nowhere, but his Camero hadn’t been outside. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Ronan kicked Noah’s ankle on the way by. 

“It’s not me that there’s something wrong with,” Noah said. He was gazing unblinking up at the high ceiling. Light from the window cut across his middle. 

“Woah, buddy, I wouldn’t say that. I can think of plenty of things wrong with you.”

Noah flexed his palms, stretching out his fingers at little increment wider. “Everything,” he said, “Is out of order.” 

“The fuck you on about?” 

“I can’t…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s just all jumbled. More than usual. You know what I mean?” 

Ronan snorted. “No… Where’s Dick?” 

Noah sat up. “Nino’s,” he said. “He said he was finally going to do it.”

“He’s said that before,” Ronan replied. 

They were talking, of course, of Gansey developing the nerve -- and the correct assembly of words -- to ask out the waitress.  

“Do you want to bet if he’s going to offend her again?” asked Noah. 

“Oh, he’s definitely going to fucking offend her. The question is how fucking much.” 

 

#

 

Ronan dreamed of thick ink climbing up his legs, up his body, pouring forcefully into his mouth and down his throat. He dreamed of the low hum of swarms of bees. He dreamed of caves, as deep as a blinking eye. He dreamed of a little girl pressing her cold fingers to the inside of his wrist. 

He also dreamed of Adam Parrish. And in his dreams Parrish was as elusive and impossible to touch as liquid mercury.  

 

#

 

Three days later, on a school day where he was actually up at the right, bright, god-forsaken hour of the morning to get to Aglionby well and early, Ronan discovered a pile of quartz crystals on the hood of his car. They weren’t identical, but they were nearly. Uncanny enough to be beyond coincidence. And each and every one glowed with the unworldly internal light, that same unnatural quality Ronan had found in his dream stone. 

“What’s that?” Gansey asked from behind him as he trotted down Monmouth’s front steps, keys jingling in his hands. They could carpool, but Ronan was already feeling particularly itchy today and wanted to be able to escape school grounds on his own fucking schedule if he so goddamn ordained it. 

It look Ronan only three long strides to reach his car. With a sweep of his arm, he knocked the quartz off the hood, scattering them across the ground. All that remained was a series of chaotic scratches on the black gloss.   

 

#

 

Ronan’s blood was beyond boiled by the time he reached Aglionby. He had outraced Gansey in the Pig there, easy, because his whole body had turned to lead in the driver’s seat. Then he was in the halls, stalking, in search for one person. 

He made do with the first of said person’s lackies he spotted. 

Ronan grabbed Skov by the lapel and slammed him into the lockers. “Where’s K?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Skov said. “He’s in school less than you.”  
Finding Kavinsky at school had been kind of a stupid plan. It didn’t matter that K always seemed to find him: out on the roads, in the wrong aisle of the grocery store, like accidents. Ronan, fuck him, always had to go looking. 

“Where did he get the rocks?” Ronan said. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lynch,” Skov said, giving a little jerk like he was hoping to get loose of Ronan’s grip. He didn’t. “But K can get anything, man. Anything his mind can think up.”

Anything his mind could think up. 

Ronan released Skov, the curl of his fingers loosening as slow as cement, as if it was in opposition of every natural intuition. Because Skov’s wasn’t the real face he wanted to punch, to demand answers: How did you know? How did you get the stones? How live the way you do, drinking and drugs and driving and kissing boys like your soul wasn’t cracking? 

“Shit, man,” Skov said, tugging down his shirt once when Ronan released him completely. “You need to get laid.” 

Ronan shoved him into the lockers once more and then -- Gansey would’ve been proud -- walked away.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr at ungoodgatsby.tumblr.com


	5. Chapter 5

“Party at Litchfield House. You coming, Gansey-boy?” Henry Cheng slid into a seat across from Gansey and Ronan at the lunch table without invite or hesitation. “You can even bring Lynch,” he added. “As long as he promises not to break anything.” 

“Like your hair,” Ronan said, because Cheng’s hair was way too stiffly vertical not be breakable. 

“Haha,” Cheng replied with sneering sarcasm. Attention shifting back to Gansey, he said, “You in?” 

Gansey tilted his head, an affable nod that substituted as any answer the viewer wanted it to be. It looked like a good consideration, a deliberation, a definite maybe. Ronan knew him well enough to read it as a more accurate ‘probably not.’ Gansey rarely went to parties even though he was a person pretty much invited to all of them the Aglionby crowd threw. His easy nature made everyone think he was their friend; his elusiveness made him all the more desirable. 

“Why are there so many parties at this school?” Gansey asked, varnished with politeness. 

“Because we have a virulent lust for life, G-man,” Cheng said, pounding a punctuating slap onto the table top. “We want to touch the stars and live in our effervescent present.” 

“And get plastered,” Ronan said. 

Cheng ticked a finger in his direction. “Exactly.” He stood up. “Think about it.” He disappeared into the rest of the lunchroom, perhaps to target other potential party guests. 

Ronan flicked a pea from his plate across the width of the table. “Litchfield House party? Sounds fucking lame… Oh, Christ. Look at your face. You’re thinking of going.”

“I owe him one,” Gansey said. “He gave me a lead. On a valley. Glendower-related.” 

Ronan’s eye twitched. “How does he know about Glendower?”  
Gansey set his cafeteria-provided fork along the brim of his plate, like he was at a fine dining restaurant declaring himself done with his meal. Ronan had seen him eat cereal and milk out of the plastic cereal insert bag so he didn’t know who Gansey thought he was fooling. 

“We got to talking one of those days you were off god knows where.” 

“Why?”

“I know he has a very…” Gansey paused considering, “Enthusiastic personality --”

“Annoying --” Ronan interjected as correction.

“But,” Gansey plowed onward. “He’s actually really smart and insightful, which is more than you can say for your extracurricular friends.” 

“Kavinsky and his fucking lackies are not my friends.” 

“You say that a lot,” Gansey said. “But the thing is, Ronan, is that sometimes a person’s words and actions can contradict.”

#

 

It was different than the last, recent parties Ronan had been to. All of which had been Kavinsky’s. Parties which had something feral about them. An ‘all men for themselves’ energy. Cheng’s party was different. Sure there was still drinking and bad pounding dance music, but it was tinged with the veneer of ‘all in good fun.’ There were a lot people just standing around tamely and talking with solo cups.  

“You made it!” Cheng exclaimed, spotting Gansey -- with Ronan in his shadow -- when they made it inside. He was already weaving with tipsy-ness. 

“When’s the party start?” Ronan shot back, because he may be a guest but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be rude. 

Not far into the party, either measured timewise or by distance made into the house, Gansey was swept away by his need to be cordial by a swarm of people eager for his attention. It didn’t surprise Ronan, but it did leave him alone with no distraction for his natural destructive energy. 

So he decided root out where Cheng’s room and let inspiration take him from there. Maybe rearrange his possessions and watch it drive him mad for the next following weeks.  

Last thing he expected when he made it upstairs was Adam Parrish stepping out into the hall from the bathroom. He staggered a wobbly step, clinging to the doorknob for support, then finally looked up to set eyes on Ronan, who was frozen in place. 

“Hey, you,” he said. 

“What’re you doing here?” Ronan demanded, because he was pretty sure Cheng would never invite Kavinsky to his party and he equally doubted Parrish got an independant invitation. 

“Someone here called K on a matter of business,” Parrish said. “I was with him at the time, so here I am.”

“Don’t sound too fucking excited about it.” 

Parrish released the doorknob, leaving the door open wide and filling the patch of hall with bathroom bright fluorescents. He leaned against the wall. “He makes such good money doing that.” He snorted. “Maybe I should start.” 

“Don’t --” he said, a weird, gut reaction. It wasn’t like he was some harbinger of morality. But there were some things that Joseph Kavinsky, rich and dangerous, could get away with in this town that wouldn’t work out the same for Parrish, as steel-boned as he was. “You’re too smart for it.”

Parrish snorted again. “Smart doesn’t mean anything. Smart can’t get you anywhere unless you have enough money to make the first step.” Parrish turned his head to look Ronan straight in the eye,  and with that shift in the cast light Ronan saw he was sporting a bruise on his chin.

He couldn’t help himself. He had moved closer without even noticing, and now he was lifting a hand to brush a thumb against that bruise. 

“If you’re going to get in so many fights, you should make sure to win,” Ronan said. 

Parrish ducked his head, and Ronan’s hand dropped away. “It wasn’t a fight,” he said. “And I never win.” 

He unducked his head as the muffled music from the floor below grew louder and looked Ronan right in the eye. “That’s what it is to be Adam Parrish.” 

Ronan held his gaze. 

Parrish blinked, something like a concession in their informal staring contest.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said. 

“Like what?” Ronan countered, because he didn’t think he was looking at Parrish at any one way but a multitude of ways. Parrish was like a tangled knot of strings, and he trying to follow at least a few through to the end. 

“Like you pity me.”

Now Ronan blinked, because it wasn’t that.  

“That’s not how I’m looking at you.” 

“Then how?” Parrish demanded. 

Ronan had another crazy impulse. Filled with magnetism. The need to move instead of to think. He worked best in motion. And if he found the right speed, it would be just the balance of slow enough to be rebuffed if needed and fast enough not for him to chicken out part way.

Muscles braced over every single inch of his body. He hadn’t a drop to drink tonight and yet he was filled with reckless passion.

Parrish’s eyes flicked down Ronan’s face, then back up. 

Up the steps called an interloping voice: “You done pissing up there, Parrish!” 

Parrish leaned back; Ronan hadn’t realized Parrish had even leaned in. 

“Gotta go,” he said, and pushed off the wall, and walked past Ronan like that was it. 

Ronan abandoned his quest for Cheng’s room, and instead made it a quest for the keg.

 

#

 

“Come on, Buddy,” Gansey said, his voice strange in the canals of Ronan’s ears. He wrapped one of Ronan’s arms around his shoulders and heaved. “You’re too heavy for me to drag up the stairs.” 

Ronan blinked. It was dark and the darker shape of Monmouth Manufacturing towered before him. 

Inside. Steps. Bed. An easy calculation, but the definition of harder said than fucking done. 

Gansey tugged again and Ronan started forward as smooth as a wheel on a rusty axle. 

“Why does he do it?”  

“Why does who do what?” Gansey said, flipping through his keys at the door, clink and clatter. 

Ronan hmmed, because he hadn’t meant to say that out loud and words where kind of difficult to form at the moment anyway. 

“Stupid shit,” he managed to say once Gansey had pulled the door open. “Why do people do stupid shit that hurts them?”

Gansey paused, a sudden change in momentum that had Ronan stumbling forward. He had to catch himself instead of face planting. 

“When I figure that out,” Gansey said. “I’ll let you know.” 

 

#

 

Ronan fell asleep as quickly and solidly as a tree chopped down in a forest fell. It was the sleep of drunkard, with alcohol making it ease to go under. Ronan rarely had such a pleasure as easy sleep. Sometimes, when he got drunk enough, he didn’t even dream.

Tonight was not one of those nights. 

He was walking through his dream forest. It was dawn or twilight or just a very overcast mid-light. There was light, but just a glow of it. The forest smelled very much like a forest did just after a rain, although there was no evidence of damp. 

Ronan placed his hand on an old, gnarled tree trunk and looked up. As soon as he did, leaves -- fresh and green -- started raining down like it was the middle of a particularly breezy autumn day. But not just leaves, or not just the type of leaves that grew on trees out in the awake world. Ronan snatched one of the suspect things out of the air. It was paper -- torn up pieces from pages of a hundred books. Strange. That was never something he had dreamed before.  

He let loose the paper and it continued its fluttering dance to the ground. That was when he saw that there was someone else in the forest -- a silhouette shape of a human between the trees. He had dreamed people before. 

Ronan started walking fast toward the person. Not wanting to be heard approaching, to be recognized being able to do the recognizing, the forest muffled his footsteps. A subconscious want easily and freely given. 

The vague silhouette turned into a more defined thing the closer Ronan got. Human figure to teenage boy to a very particular teenage book with wavey, close-cropped hair and a worn t-shirt and a constellation of freckles over his tan nose.

Parrish. 

Ronan crept closer, the forest still on his side. Parrish hadn’t noticed him yet. Right now his head was craned up, much like Ronan’s had been a few dream moments before. The leaves and ripped pages fell in a whirlwind around him. 

The light favored everything about him. Walking one tree closer, Ronan could see this Parrish had the same bruise as he had seen the real Parrish wearing at the party. He didn’t like that. 

Ronan closed his eyes and thought, ‘no bruise.’ When he opened his eyes, the bruise was still there. Ronan frowned. Strange. But this forest had been stubborn before. 

Direct action, then.    

Ronan stepped out from behind the trunk. “What’re you doing in my dream?” he called out. 

Adam jerked, a little twitch of surprise. Strange for something in a dream, for dreams seemed to always smooth the edges of disparate elements. Things exist and then don’t exist in dreams at random, and somehow it was always illogically logic.

Adam squinted at him. “What’re you doing in my trip?” 

Ronan walked right up to him. What did it matter? He had dreamed versions of people he knew in his waking life before. Any interaction didn’t translate to real life. 

Stopping within a few feet of Adam and employing all of his height, he said, “My dream.”

“No,” Parrish countered. “My hallucination.” 

This close, Ronan could seen another curious detail of dream Parrish: bloodshot eyes. 

“Are you high?” 

Parrish scoffed. “Yeah. That’s the whole idea.” He shoved Ronan in the arm, which wasn’t something he had ever done in real life. “I’ve had a bad week. You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”

“No one knows what it’s like to be anyone else,” Ronan countered. “That’s fucking life.”  

Because Ronan had somehow and for some reason dreamed a drugged up Parrish, Parrish took this observation under serious condition. He then huffed. 

“Alright. Then tell me what it’s like to be Ronan Lynch.” Then with a quick added thought, he amended, “In one word.” He held up a pointer finger. “I know you don’t like to talk much. Probably not even in my head too, so I’m doing you a favor. Tell me who you are on the inside with one word.”  

Ronan didn’t lie, but he sure could evade, obscure, and omit. So he said something true, but inconsequential unless you added up with a lot of other unknown factors: 

“Lava.” 

He sure felt like one of these days he was going to burn up from the inside out. 

Parrish tilted his head. “Interesting,” he said. “Because it’s only lava after the volcanoes erupted and it's on the surface.” 

“You’re nerd is showing,” Ronan said. 

Parrish scoffed.

“What about you?” Ronan said. “What’s your word?” 

“Want,” Parrish said, not hesitating a blink. 

“Want?” 

“I’m just a bunch of atoms,” he said, “Stuffed into the shape of a person, and each and every one of them wants…” -- he held the ‘s’ like it as a swear word -- “all the things I can’t have.” 

He turned his eyes to the tree branches again. “But enough about that. I don’t want this to turn into a bad trip.” 

“I know all fucking about wanting things I can’t have,” Ronan said. Admissions weren’t his thing, but this was a dream and even his dreams were loosened with alcohol right now, so there was no reason to hold back and all of them to let them slide. Why would Parrish be right here right now if not a purest manifestation of that -- want. 

Ronan laid his hand on the side of Parrish’s neck, very much how he had ached to back in the hallway of the house party. What a safe, second chance place this dream was. 

Parrish’s bloodshot eyes returned to Ronan’s face, gaze steady. Unblinking. Knowing. Something unidentifiable ballooned tight in Ronan’s chest. 

In his dreams Ronan Lynch could be anything. He could even be himself. 

Ronan leaned in; Adam met him somewhere in between. 


	6. Chapter 6

Head a ring with the pain of a hangover, Ronan was ready to finally murder his phone for good. It was a long time coming, but even someone favorable to phones could be tempted to violence under these conditions: hangover plus the constant chiming of received texts. 

Ronan threw out a wild arm from where he lay on his mattress in search of the thing, discarded somewhere on the floor after the return home the night before. Once he had it in hand he could throw it as hard as possible against the wall. Or turn it off. Whatever, just something, and measured by how pissed he was once he picked it up and saw who was responsible for this annoyance, on a scale from Matthew to Declan. 

What he didn’t expect to see was a serious of salacious, lewd, and profanity laden texts from an unknown number. It only took scanning over a few for Ronan to come to a concrete conclusion: Kavinsky got hold of Ronan’s phone number. 

Ronan wasn’t sure how, where, or when, but he did know the definitely fucking why. To annoy the shit out of him. Kavinsky was too smart in his annoyance techniques to call. A call could easily be ignored. Never answered and never heard. Texts, however, pinged up on the screen, clear evidence of thoughts conveyed. 

“This will get you to pay attention,” the latest one read, with the symbol indicating a picture attached. Ronan shouldn’t open it, but Ronan Lynch, in all his contradictions, was a glutton for punishment. Maybe somewhere deep, down he thought he deserved it. 

Ronan opened the picture. It was Parrish, face soft with sleep. It hadn’t been so many hours ago that Ronan and a dream version of Parrish had been enjoying each other’s company in a forest that served as a backdrop for many of Ronan’s nighttime wanderings. 

Ronan extended an arm, middle finger up, snapped a photo of the gesture, and sent it to Kavinsky in return. It was like feeding a mountain lion, but K hadn’t been satisfied with Ronan ignoring his first eleven texts. There was no evidence that further ignoring him would lead to positive results. 

Kavinsky’s response text read: “Bitch. Get over here. After party. Now.” 

At 11:05 am, it was either too early or too late for an after party, Ronan didn’t know which. 

Ronan texted back: “Fuck Off. Sleeping.” 

He was showing his hand more and more. He should turn off the phone and throw it across the room. Like the original plan. It was that easy. Except... 

K’s text: “Fine. I’ll have fun with Parrish without you.”

Ronan swore aloud. He threw back his covers and sat up too fast, brain spiraling in his skull. He was going over there, hangover or not. 

 

#

 

When he got to K’s joint, the only ones there were K and Adam. And presumably K’s mom tucked away somewhere. 

“I thought this was supposedly to a fucking party,” Ronan said, eyeing up the two: K smoking a cigarette while watching a shoot em up movie on the big screen and Parrish awake now but not without looking like he was fighting fifteen earths’ gravities to stay upright.

“I said after party,” K said. “It’s exclusive.” 

“Motherfucker.” Ronan left the entertainment room for the kitchen, hangover deciding to ping him right in the middle of the forehead. He left for the kitchen, too familiar already with this ugly, goddamn house-mansion that reeked a lot of sterile money and not at all like home. He came back with two bottles of water. One he slapped into Parrish’s limp hand.

Parrish startled, but fingers grasped the bottle just in time for it not to drop to the floor. He stared at Ronan as he collapsed into an unoccupied armchair covered in supple leather. It the stare of someone who had just noticed something. It transformed into the stare of someone who was thinking. At the end of it all, there was pink flushed around Parrish’s neck. 

Not that Ronan was staring back, but of course he fucking was.   

On the screen someone was shot in the head in gory, explicit detail; Kavinsky erupted in laughter. Parrish flinched. 

He looked like crap. Ronan still liked looking at him, but he looked like crap. Wrinkled clothes, dark circles under his eyes, eyes not bright and clear in the way one would hope they’d look fresh in the morning. Ronan was sure he wasn’t so good looking himself at the moment. He was in the same clothes from the party last night. 

Parrish twisted the cap of the bottle, downed about half of it, then ran a hand over his chin to catch a wayward drip. It was fluid motions of a haggard person. A moment later, he stood. 

Kavinsky threw a leg up, extended from him on the couch to the coffee table, blocking Parrish’s path. “Where you going?” 

“To go piss. Christ.” Parrish nudged K’s leg with his knee. K dropped it and Parrish left the room. 

K released a long curl of smoke from his mouth, watched as it ascended and dissipated towards the high ceiling. Up there, a ceiling fan was chopping in slow waves. 

“He’s been so goddamn uptight lately.” K said. “And not in the fun away.”  
“Don’t talk about him like that.” It was a knee jerk reaction of a statement. The sideways implication in K’s statement had made him defensive. Fuck, he was useless at playing it cool. 

Kavinsky leaned forward on the couch, taking his cigarette out of his mouth. For this. “Why the fucking hell not?” he said. “Why the fucking hell does it matter what I say about him?” The ‘to you’ laid there unsaid but all implied. Added on, it would have had a worse effect than any explicative. “He doesn’t matter in all this at all.”   

Ronan kicked the coffee table out from under Kavinsky’s feet. K dropped his cigarette, the lit end smouldering on the carpet. He stomped it out with a twist of his heel, smearing ash with no regard. 

“What’s your damage, Lynch?”

“Don’t like listening to your fucking voice or looking a your fucking face, that’s all.” 

Of all ways Kavinsky could’ve reacted -- equally poisonous words or fisticuffs -- he did the improbable. He threw back his head and laughed. 

“Christ, man, we keeping playing this game back and forth. I keep wondering when we’re going to finally get over the foreplay and cut to it.” 

“The fuck you talking about?”

“Shit, Lynch. Are you playing dumb or are you really this goddamn stupid?”

Ronan’s hand curled into his fists. He could explode right now if he wanted to, but he didn’t come here all this way, headache and all, for Kavinsky. That was where Kavinsky was very, very wrong. 

“Fuck off.”

K tilted up his chin, smug and lazy. “Lynch, I’m the only person in this world who can understand you.” 

Ronan stood up. “Kill me if that ever becomes true.” 

He tramped out of the room in no chaotic direction. Or maybe in the direction to the nearest bathroom he knew about. The one Parrish and him had shared vodka and confidences that first Kavinsky blow out party. 

Luck’s on his side, because Parrish is standing in that hall, looking so very out of place against the off-white walls and the marble tile floor, which was a very pristine color pallette when he looked every inch homegrown and all the more desirable for it. Ronan Lynch was, deep down, a farm boy. 

Parrish didn’t notice him at first. He was reading that letter from weeks ago. It could’ve been a different one, but the creases were worn and the paper smudged with fingerprints. Plus, Ronan just had a goddamn hunch. 

“What’s that?” Ronan had seen that before; he had asked this before. 

Parrish rushed to stuff it into his back pocket. “Just another thing I want and can’t have,” he said. His voice was scratchy, but that was the last thing Ronan heard. Parrish’s words just now had seemed awfully familiar to the ones Ronan had dreamt up his saying. 

Ronan stepped forward. Maybe he didn’t want to be deterred this time. 

“What do you want?”

Parrish shifted, maybe uncomfortable with the intensity of the moment. The envelope fell out of his pocket and onto the tile floor. They were still, the both of them. Ronan looked from it to the boy. Parrish shrugged an inch, so Ronan stooped down to scoop it up. 

But he didn’t open it, no matter how much curiosity tugged at him. Kavinsky was the type to take without permission; Ronan understood the safety of secrets.

He held it out for Parrish. Parrish took the letter with unsteady hands. 

“Early admission,” he said, which Ronan guessed was an explanation. “For college. Out of town.” A huff. “Out of state. I’ve taken enough electives that I could be considered graduated… But they didn’t want me. Regret to inform. Try again next year…” He shook his head, not looking at Ronan. Not looking at nothing. “If I can make it to next year.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Parrish ran a hand over his face. “Nothing. Just… I’ve had a bad week, okay?” 

Ronan blinked. “A bad week…?” Parrish had said the same thing the dream. 

“I lost one of my jobs.” One of? “My dad’s been… And these things with my head just keep getting worse. I need harder and harder shit just to get through the day. To sleep… You don’t understand what it’s like to be me.” 

Ronan sucked in a breath. Another reminiscent thing.

“I have night terrors,” Ronan said. “I usually can’t sleep.” Admissions were weird, but Parrish had just given him a bunch. 

Parrish’s brow wrinkled. To himself, and maybe not even supposed to be aloud, he said, “So it’s not just on the outside...” 

“What was that?” 

“Oh, um…” He flushed a little, up the neck. “Just that maybe all your shit isn’t in the surface, like…” 

“Lava?” Ronan dared. 

His wrinkled brow grew more intense. “How did you --?”

“Lynch! You’re still fucking here.” 

Kavinsky had proven himself to have a sixth sense for interruption. Or maybe in the same way he had used Parrish’s picture to get Ronan’s attention to his texts, K had a sixth sense for leaving the two of them to their own devices. 

Ronan shoved his hands in his jeans pockets. “I was just fucking leaving.” He didn’t want K to be a part of this. He didn’t even want him to get a hint of being a part of this. 

So he left. He left with Parrish’s gaze burning at the back of his neck. 

 

#

 

He wanted to dream that night. He wanted to get to the forest. But he was restless and edgy, his mind rushing and gearing on in stops and starts. He could only get a few moments peaceful under the darkness of his eyelids before strange anxieties pulled him back from sleep, heart thundering in his chest. 

 

#

 

Back when Parrish was a new thing to his periphery, and the things between the three of them -- Ronan, Kavinsky, Parrish -- had gotten tangled up and intense, Ronan had asked Swan where the fuck Parrish had come from. Swan because Ronan found him the least worst of the lot of them. Once or twice they had even talked about cars in a coherent way, more than just fast and crashing them. If he hadn’t gotten knotted up with Kavinsky, Swan might even ended up to be tolerable. 

“K needed something fixed on the Mitsu,” he had answered, casual and not all that interested. Ronan liked that too about him, like he wasn’t going to report back his words. “Parrish knows cars. Works at a mechanics or something. I don’t know, Lynch. You know K does what he wants and doesn’t answer shit to anybody.” 

Facts were, as Ronan figured, that weren’t a lot of mechanic shops in Henrietta propper. It was just small town economics -- not enough people with cars to keep it feed. 

He popped the hood of the car, scooped up a handful of gravel from Monmouth’s lot, and dumped it over the BMW’s engine. Whatever it did was enough to complain that his car was making a noise. 

 

#

 

“My car’s making a noise.” 

Parrish tapped a socket wrench against his thigh. He was in a t-shirt with coveralls tied at his hips in a big bunch, a smear of oil across his jaw.   

The fact that Ronan Lynch was able to form words in this circumstance was a miracle in and of its-fucking-self. 

“What kind of noise?” Parrish asked. 

“Like someone threw gravel in the engine.”

“...Did someone throw gravel in the engine?” 

Ronan said, “You’re the mechanic.” 

“We charge for labor and parts.” Parrish brushed past him. “Can you pop the hood?” 

Ronan reached inside the card and popped the hood. Parrish lifted it up, blinked down at what was hidden underneath: the engine of a really nice car, with some gravel sitting as evidence -- not dislodged from the drive -- sitting on top the engine block.

“You could’ve just lied about a noise,” he said. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ronan said. 

Parrish brushed the gravel away. “You didn’t put any in the gas tank, did you? Pull out any belts? Cut the break lines?” 

“No,” Ronan said.

“You should be fine then,” Parrish said. “Any noise would’ve been the gravel shaking free and falling through. Bring it back if the noise continues.” He slammed the hood shut. 

“What do I owe you?” 

“We don’t charge for the diagnosis.” 

“Huh.” 

“...I get off at four.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so... next chapter's going to be from Adam's POV


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is from Adam's POV. While I think I made it clear in the text, so no one gets confused, the beginning of this chapter jumps a little backward in time and recounts some events of the previous chapter from Adam.

There was something about these mornings, before they put on their protective barbs.

“Morning,” Kavinsky mumbled, and it was laced with exactly no irony or malice. He drew to full consciousness inch by inch, and right then wasn’t awake enough to include it. 

Not that Adam could claim to be a morning person either. He lied on the bed that was by all logic too large for a teenage boy, not willing to get up because he was nestled in the warm spot; he could still feel where K had laid next to him even though he was already gone from it. Adam slept better here than at home. 

Across the room, K rustled through the contents of a dresser, dropping shirts on the floor until he found the one he wanted. He always treated his possessions with this lack of regard, which set Adam’s teeth on edge, but he kept it to himself. There was a maid or housekeeper or something that showed up once or twice a week, and the house was always put back in order without Kavinsky even having to consider it for a second. Sometimes Adam fantasized about living with that lack of concern about the minutiae of daily life, but it was about as realistic as fantasizing about super powers. 

Kavinsky pulled a shirt over his head, covering the scattering of moles on his back that Adam knew all the placement of. He could still feel the phantom weight of K’s arm were it had been thrown over Adam’s side when they had mutually slipped awake. 

K crossed the room to stand beside what had become Adam’s side of the bed. 

“You getting up?” he asked, leaning over him. 

Adam released a noise that wasn’t in anyway a word, but was clearly an answer: Not yet. 

Adam shut his eyes. He felt the kiss land just under his jaw. 

In the mornings, Joseph Kavinsky wasn’t some drug dealer with a death wish and only room in his heart to be worshipped or feared. In the mornings, he was just a boy. Not a boy Adam could imagine falling in love with, if Adam Parrish was somehow capable of love out of his sore heart. A boy, though, he’d be comfortable pretending with in these tiny little slices of familiarity. Instead of the stark, bloodless arrangement they were in most hours of the day.   

He understood it, in a passing glimpse, why people who didn’t seem happy stayed married. Because between all the other shit where these little moments that you wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, being alone. And Adam Parrish may have lived in a cramped space in his family’s trailer with two other people, but he had very much, his entire life, been alone. 

“Get a shower.” K’s breath was right over his ear. “You fucking reek.”

Adam threw out an arm to swat him away. He was too slow. It only met air. Kavinsky’s laughter faded out of the room. 

 

#

 

Last night, K had asked him somewhere around the crux of 11 pm, “You staying?” 

It was a stupid question. It was too late for Adam to go home, well past curfew if he wasn’t on the schedule to work at the trailer factory. Which he wasn’t anymore. Lay offs. Last in, first out. The hypocrisy of it, he could get away with staying out all night, just not coming home when it was too late. 

He thought it had to do with the logic of how much he was on his father’s radar. Come home in the middle of the night, Adam was disturbing his sleep. Come home in the morning or middle of day when he was already awake or, even better, out of the trailer, it was forgotten. Adam never got much consideration to his well being, just to how much of a burden he was.  

“Yeah,” Adam told K. He was staying. 

He was bunched up at the headboard of K’s bed, his physics textbook open atop his knees, but he his attempt at reading was failing. He was too tired. He had one less job and he was still tired. 

His head always hurt. 

K held out a joint he had been smoking in offering. Adam waved it away. That shit made him paranoid.  

“Give me something else,” he said. “Give me something that’ll make me feel that I’m not living in this world anymore.” 

“God,” K had said. “You’re depressing.”

Drier than the Sahara Desert, Adam had replied, “Thanks.”

Kavinsky had went to the cabinet beside his bed and dug out something Adam had never seen from his stash before: little green pills. 

“I can’t fix what’s inside your head, Parrish, but this will give you sweet dreams.” 

That night, Adam hallucinated an impossible forest and another boy’s mouth.

 

#

 

Of course, said boy showed up that very morning. Ronan Lynch. He was always dodging Kavinsky’s steps, and Adam wasn’t an idiot enough not to noticed how Kavinsky’s gaze would follow Lynch with a vicious hunger. 

Lynch slammed a bottle of water into Adam’s hands, and that shocked him into the moment. Their eyes caught for a second before Lynch obstinately glared at the television screen. His eyes were as blue as a lake frosted over. Adam had never thought pale blue an angry color until he had met Ronan Lynch. 

Adam bit his bottom lips, remembering the very real sensations from his drug trip last night. In the illusion, the two of them hadn’t gone farther than kissing (and Adam had gone much further than kissing before, so it wasn’t just a lack of knowledge or imagination) but he felt embarrassed just thinking about. The heat of the room was too much, between Lynch and K. The boy he dreamed of kissing and the boy he shared a bed with. 

He stood. He needed space. He needed air. 

“Where you going?” K asked, blocking his way.

“To go piss. Christ.” 

 

#

 

It was 4:03, and Lynch’s expensive, rich kid car pulled up into Boyd’s parking lot. The charcoal black BMW sent a shock of envy and hate Adam experienced whenever he spied one of the fancy cars the Aglionby boys drove around, rarely knowing shit about the things that kept the running and never paying a bill for them with their own work. 

Adam crossed the parking lot and climbed into the passenger’s seat. 

They had had a really weird conversation earlier, the two of them, and now seemed the time to sort it out. If one of them would just break the silence first. 

“No more gravel?” Adam asked. 

“Fuck,” Lynch said, but like a laugh. 

A muscle in Adam’s cheek twitched but he smoothed his expression back to impassive. No unbidden smiles here. 

Lynch revved the engine more than necessary as he shot down the road, but a lot of his getup was more than necessary. The tatoo, the language, the overdrawn scowls. Pain and anger overflowed onto the outside. Like lava. 

Which zoomed Adam’s brain right back to why they were here. 

“Lava,” he said, because it seemed like a plenty profound thing for a hallucinating brain to come up with; it seemed a lot less likely for Ronan Lynch to say it again in real life. 

Parrish watched as Lynch’s fingers tightened on the wheel. On instinct Parrish braced under the seat belt, expecting a rush of acceleration but Lynch kept the car going steady. Over the posted speed limit, but steady. 

“You hungry?” Lynch asked. 

Adam was always hungry. 

“It’s four in the afternoon,” he said, a strategic non answer. 

Lynch said, “I could fucking eat.” Then he swerved with a screech into the parking lot outside the local grocery store.  

Adam followed Lynch inside because what else was their to do but mount a sit-in protest in the passenger seat. He watched a Lynch ransacked the snack aisle into the bottom of a cart. Adam chose a few economically priced items for himself. Watching someone eat was worse than being hungry. 

He fiddled with his wallet as they made their way to the front of the store, already doing quick calculations in his head. He knew he had enough money in his wallet because he didn’t have the leisure of not knowing how much money was in his wallet at any given time. But even that half ounce of anxious unsureness had him wanting to double check, before he embarrassed himself in the checkout lane again, identifying himself as the desperate type of poor. 

“I got it,” Lynch said as when reached the check out line. 

Adam snapped the six dollars he had counted out for his carefully chosen and calculated items onto the conveyor belt. They stared each other down. When it reached the end, Ronan snatched it up and put it on top of the cash he handed over to the cashier. 

Outside, Lynch threw his bagged groceries into the car with little abandon; Adam clutched his singular bag, handles wrapped choking around his wrist. 

Done, Lynch lined up his empty cart with some distant target, face squinted with the concentration of aiming, then gave the chart a heaving push. It hurtled across the parking lot, and slantways into a cart return with an accompanying crash. Some adult on the other side of the parking lot started yelling at them, but it didn’t damped Lynch’s smirk. He did say though, “That are fucking cue” before ducking into the car. 

Lynch drove further, dumping a bag of M&Ms into his mouth on their way to wherever they were on the way to.  

He finally stopped somewhere that was nowhere, a roadside rest stop that wasn’t more than a dirt lot and a few picnics tables in disrepair. He turned off the engine and each of them waited for the other to go first. 

They had wasted an hour already. Adam had homework he could be doing, scholarships he would be researching, a nap he could be taking. Of course, how useless he would be with all of that without this nagging question answer. 

Why the fuck had Lynch said lava? 

Lynch drummed his fingers across the steering wheel. All the drive out to get here and they weren’t even getting out of the car. 

Lynch said: “We talked in the forest where the tree’s leaves were torn pages.” 

Adam jerked under his seatbelt. All this evasion and then out with it? And how did he…?

“How do you know that?” Adam demanded, heart jackhammering in his chest. 

Lynch looked him straight in the eye: “Because it was my dream.” 

“No, it was my…” The words died flat in Adam’s mouth. They had this conversation already. “That’s impossible.” 

Lynch just shrugged. This wasn’t a shruggable offense. 

Adam dragged a hand through his hair. “Did I talk in my sleep or something? Did K put you up to this?” 

“The fuck,” Lynch spat. “You think I’d do this for Joseph Kavinsky?” 

“I’m just trying to make logic out of this!” Logic, and yet this being one of K’s schemes didn’t hold up to it. Just knowing Kavinsky and Lynch’s personalities. They were much more direct and a lot less schemey. “How could you believe we just shared a dream or hallucination or whatever it was? That’s impossible.” He slowed down ‘impossible’ this time. He had said it just a few sentences ago and it hadn’t been understood by Lynch. People didn’t share dreams or drug trips. Shit, what had K given him? 

Lynch blinked. “I’ve always been impossible.” 

That wasn’t the type of statement that could be made without clarification. Adam stated so. 

“I can take things out of my dreams,” Lynch said. 

Adam wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but he was sure enough to say this: “Bullshit.”

“Remember the crystal?” Lynch challenged. “That doesn’t exist in the real world.” 

It had been a strange thing. And gone by the time Adam had come back looking for it.  

“I don’t know that it doesn’t exist in the real world for sure,” Adam replied, although his curiosity had interrupted a study session of his in the lame library of Mountain View for a little independent study geology lesson. He hadn’t been successful in identifying the anomaly Lynch had shown him.

“Fucking know what?” Lynch said, “You the impossible one.” 

“You can’t expect me to believe such a ridiculous proposition without even any proof.” 

“You lived the proof,” Lynch countered, which was actually a pretty solid argument.  

Adam took a breath. “Science requires duplicatable results.”

“This isn’t science,” Lynch said. “Whatever this fucking is, it isn’t science.”  

Adam shook his head. This was insane. 

“If I say… If I say I can believe that were somehow shared a dream, or whatever it was. That  _ that _ actually happened… is that enough for now?” 

Lynch nodded once, a little jerk of the chin. 

Adam pressed the heel of his hands into his eye sockets. God, his brain hurt.

When he took them away, his vision took a moment to clear. When it did, his eyes landed on the dashboard clock. 

“I need to get home,” he said. When he wasn’t scheduled to work late, which was an acceptable excuse, and when he wasn’t planning to spend the whole night out at K’s, he liked to get home before his father. When he got home after, it lead to a lot of questions of where he had been, and why, and why he thought that was a better place to be than home helping his mother, or some other innate character flaw. Depending on his father’s mood that day, it could escalate to more than questions. 

“Alright,” Lynch said, hand on the gearshift. “Where to?”

“You can drop me back off at Boyd’s,” Adam replied. “I can get home from there.” When people found out where Adam lived, they tended to judge him or pity him. Adam had never decided which was worse. Nowadays, worn out with it, he mostly had a fuck you attitude about it. He just didn’t want Lynch’s judgement or pity at the moment. 

“Are you worried about telling me where you life?” Lynch asked. “I’m not going to stalk you.”

“You showed up at my place of work with a fake car problem.” Not that Adam had minded, actually. 

Lynch was quiet, then said, “Because I’m fucking tired having to wait Kavinsky to invite me places to see you.” 

Adam sucked in a breath through his nostrils. There had been something else in that occured in the shared dream slash hallucination slash whatever the impossible fuck it was. Something they had talked so expertly around this entire conversation that it even hadn’t been hinted at. This, so far, had been the closest the got. 

They had kissed. 

“I didn’t think it was real,” Adam said, meaning he wouldn’t have done in real life what he had done when he thought he was in the confines of his own head. 

“Yeah,” Lynch said. “Same.”

He stared at Adam. Adam stared back. Part of it didn’t matter that it wasn’t real, or that they only kissed because they thought it would have no real world consequences. Because they kissed and in that act revealed hidden truths about themselves, their wants, and the inner workings of their hearts.

“You know the trailer park off of Blue Ridge Road?” Adam said. 

“Yeah.”

“Take me there.” 

 

#

He held his breath when he opened the front door of the trailer. Inside, his dad’s armchair was empty. His truck hadn’t been outside, but it wasn’t always a guarantee. He shut the front door and escaped to his tiny little bedroom. 

There wasn’t much room in there for anything beyond his bed and dresser. No room to pace. No room to sit. So he lied down, and pulled his one pillow over his face to block daylight and the sounds of his mother moving ghostlike around. 

He was roughly 48 hours out from any drugs, but his mind still swarmed with half-formed images, half-glimpsed, and even less understood. 

If he were honest, he knew they had started showing up before he touched any of K’s hard stuff. Vines and whispers. Something begging him for and demanding from him attention. Like he had anything extra to give to fantasy. 

And now it had gotten worse.   

Adam tossed the pillow aside. It wasn’t working. He couldn’t get to sleep now, with his mind changing its mind every three and a half seconds. 

In his room, he had a special hiding place for some of his more precious and secretive things. The things he didn’t want either of his parents from finding. He kept these things in an old shoebox. He kept the old shoebox in the farthest to reach corner under his bed, behind other boxes of much more mundane stored things. You have to both know where it was and he flexible enough to get under the bed and reach it. 

Adam got down on the floor to retrieve it now. He preferred to only get it out when neither of his parents were home or both of them were sleeping. Just his mother being around was a calculated risk. In it was several things that would be incriminating. An envelope of emergency cash that Adam tried to forget was there so that he could save it for a real emergency instead of once of the lesser ones that plagued his life, like he was really fucking hungry, or the final notice for the electric bill had shown up off schedule with the paychecks, and other such worries. He had the last card he had ever received from his grandmother before she stopped; Dad wouldn’t even weather a mention of his wife’s mother’s existence. There was magazine clippings of people Adam found admirable. A magazine page from a Megan Fox photoshoot and a ripping from Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition weren’t the dangerous part of this collection. It was the picture of some actor he knew was semi-famous but he had never actually seen any of his movies in a slim cut suit and the Calvin Klein boxer-brief ad that was the potential issue. 

Amongst those things was the newest addition to the box. It wasn’t something he think would perturb his parents one way or the other, but had perturbed Adam enough to put it in here, in the treasured, protected place. It was a deck of tarot cards.  

He lifted it out now. 

That Blue girl had forced Adam to take them. They were from her weird aunt. Demeter? No, Persephone. 

He shut his eyes and remembered first meeting the strange woman. She had brought in her family’s minivan to Boyd’s, an old clunker of a motor vehicle that deserved to be put down and out of its misery. She hung out in the garage as Adam tested out the engine and its many faults.  

The shit with his head had only recently started occurring, in far between and fleeting passes. It happened them. He ducked his head over the engine, eyes squeezed shut, and gripped the side of the hood to brace himself. 

As vision slipped back into reality, a small hand touched the back of his shoulder. He didn’t even flinch. 

“What did you see?” she had asked. Not ‘Are you okay?’ or ‘what happened?’... the normal type of question for that situation. 

“I didn’t see anything,” he said. “I just have a headache.” 

Her hand retreated. “You can lie to me,” she said. “I understand. You just met me. But you shouldn’t make it a habit to lie to yourself.” 

After the car was fixed, she gave him a card for her psychic services and tried to convince to come visit her when he had a chance, no charge. He never went. Because he shouldn’t be seeing anything. People who saw things that weren’t there were no psychic. They were crazy. 

Adam Parrish did not need one more thing in his way of getting out of this town. 

Now, back in the present, as Adam weighed the deck in his hand the first time since he received them, he realized he wouldn’t know how to use them if he wanted to. He opened the box anyway and poured them out onto the bed anyway.   

He sifted through them, examining the pictures, some ominous and some comforting, knowing each one held some sort of untapped hidden meaning that he had never learned just as he had never learned the shapes of constellations in the night sky even though Henrietta had a better view of the night sky than a lot of other places more populated and more promising. 

Doing what he had only seen people doing with such cards in movies and tv, Adam gathered the deck, shuffled, and began laying cards out on his bed in random patterns. He did it again. And again. Certain cards made repeat appearances. More that should be statistically possible, Adam thought, but perhaps it was observation bias. Perhaps he was just really bad at shuffling. 

Before he knew it, forty minutes had passed. He might not know the hell what he was doing, but he found the process settling. Like meditation, he guessed. 

The front door banged open, a sound associated with only one thing in Adam Parrish’s life. He scrambled, dumping the tarot cards back in the box, stuffed the lid on lopsided, kicking the whole thing under the depths of his bread. 

“You home, boy?” called his father’s voice from the main room. 

“Yes, sir,” Adam called back.  His heart was racing more than a sprint. 

But nothing came of it. He heard the creak of the old armchair as his father deposited his full weight into it. 

Adam relaxed, but not completely. Just enough that the steal rod of tension that had shot through him at the potential of being caught at something he was even sure was forbidden began to have some bend to it. 

Laying back again on his mattress, Adam shut his eyes. Another year and he could start applying to colleges for real. Another year and half, and he would graduate. He just had to make it that long. No distractions. 

Ronan Lynch was a distraction. Fantasy-dreams were a distraction. Tarot cards were a distraction. 

He had school and studying. All the college research he could muster. Work to pay the bills and save up for his eventual escape. 

And Joseph Kavinsky. 

Lynch had asked him why Adam was dating him when he didn’t even seem to like him. Adam had an answer, even if at the time he had deflected with another question of his own. 

The answer was this: Adam Parrish had never been good at making friends. He was always too strange, too serious, too sad, too poor, too ‘from a bad family’. But it was almost a biological fact that people weren’t meant to live in isolation. They were meant to be part of social webs, form bonds of all types. To share, to support, and be supported in return. Whether family, friends, lovers. It didn’t matter which and what, just that it was something. 

Joseph Kavinsky was that something. He gave Adam rides when he needed them, a place to stay when he couldn’t be home, a safe address to receive mail he was hiding from his father, and touched him when all the other touch Adam had known in his life was pain. All the while Adam didn’t have to pretend not to be strange, serious, sad, or poor. Just as Kavinsky didn’t pretend to be nice, or romantic, or even that Adam was his first choice. And it worked, the exchange of needs without all the pretending that went into teenage dating. It was a good calculation to Adam’s brain, who was all counted minutes and pennies. Benefits without all the wasted time and energy of navigating complicated emotions. 

Then why, oh why, as he laid there in bed awake, wasting his time when he could be studying or he could be actually sleeping, could he only think about Ronan Lynch and the Knight of Swords. 


	8. Chapter 8

Gansey ran a line of glue along a piece of cardboard: a cereal box, eviscerated and turned inside out for parts. He lined up the folded flap without another slice of cardboard at a right angel. His miniature Henrietta post office had now broken ground.

“Could you use bottle caps for anything?” Ronan asked, leaning back in Gansey’s desk chair, balancing on the back two legs. “Because I’ve got a shit ton of those.” 

“Manhole covers, maybe?” Gansey held two slats of cardboard together with steady pressure as the glue dried. 

Pressing his heels into the floor, Ronan tilted back even further. 

“Hey, Gansey?”

Gansey pressed his glasses up his nose with the back of his knuckle while his fingers were occupied. “Yeah?” 

Ronan let the chair drop down on all four legs. “When you almost died,” he started, which was the kind of statement that made Gansey look up from his work. “And you heard that voice talking about Glendower…”

“What about it?” Gansey said; it was in a very Richard voice, guarded. 

“I’m about to sound like an asshole, but I’m not asking it as an asshole,” Ronan asked. “I just want to fucking know.”

“Alright,” Gansey said, his guard seeping back down, perhaps remembering who he was talking to. Ronan Lynch, whom he had seen at his worse. Ronan Lynch, whom had seen him at his most neurotic. Ronan Lynch, whom did not have to impress. “Go on.”

“Do you think it… actually happened? Like it wasn’t your imagination or your brain freaking out as you went through an allergic reaction or whatever other excuses people make up for... for impossible shit.” 

Gansey was quiet for a moment before his answer. For Ronan, it didn’t betray uncertainty. What it showed was measured thought. Gansey was always thinking. He couldn’t stop thinking. It was the source of his long awake nights. 

“Have I considered other possibilities?” Gansey said. “Sure. Any good researcher would. But the fact is… I was sure from the moment it happened that it happened. That the words I heard, I heard… And I know it does seem impossible, but… so was me surviving that night. Yes, I believe it actually happened.” 

That’s what Ronan thought, but he had just wanted to… double check. That there was no doubt in Gansey. That it wasn’t some game he was really good at playing. That this was in fact a dire need, an improbable truth, an impossible thing that he was chasing down. 

Ronan said, “Have I ever told you that I believed you?” 

Gansey blinked, the action magnified for the fact it was behind the lens of his glasses. “No.” He set down the right-angled walls of the to-be post office. They held. “You told me it was cool once.” That was back before Ronan’s father had died, and their friendship had been fresh, and life had been lighter because Ronan Lynch didn’t have context for trauma yet. “Ever since you’ve just… gone along with it.” 

Ronan scuffed his heel against the floor, stared with determination at the rubber streak left behind. “I fucking believe you.”

“...Thanks.” 

Ronan wondered if anyone had told Gansey they had believed him on this point, or if they had just humored him.

“At some point…” When Ronan was ready. “I’m going to need you to believe me.” 

“Okay,” Gansey said, dipping right back into confused. 

Ronan selected a pencil from the edge of Gansey’s desk. He tossed it in the air, where it pinwheeled, and caught it again. 

“You know that waitress,” Ronan said, and it was evident he could only be talking about one such waitress. 

“Yes,” Gansey said, being whiplashed with a whole other emotion set. 

“You know her family is a bunch of crazy psychics?” 

“Ah -- no, I didn’t. How did you know that?”

“Do you think psychics could help with the whole ley line situation?” 

“Perhaps…” Gansey said. “But many so-called psychics are anything but. Especially advertised psychics.” 

“Well… too fucking bad.”

“Too fucking bad?” Gansey repeated. Somehow he made the f-bomb quaint. 

Ronan tossed the pencil again. “I already booked us an appointment.” 

 

#

 

Ronan knew he had just given Gansey whiplash further. Ronan Lynch didn’t hold to any schedules. Not Declan’s demands, not the school’s, not even the sun and moon’s. Mass, yes. But that was God’s schedule, thus in a class of its own. 

But Ronan thought he needed some guidance of the supernatural variety, and there was no way he would manage to get through the door himself and ask for help. Gansey, however, was the kind of guy that kept appointments. Even when they were foisted upon him.

“What’re you doing here?” Blue had answered their knock on the front door of the psychic's house. 

“We have an appointment,” Ganse said, as if stating the obvious and accurate was a good enough response. 

Knowing now that coming up with sham reasons to visit people’s places of work (or residence) could be considered stalk-y, Ronan took the fall (as it was his fault). 

“It was me, shortstack. Thought it be riot.” 

Blue made a shitty face at him; he made a shitty face back. They might be becoming friends. 

“Come in, I guess,” she said with a sigh, stepping back out of the way. Then she shouted for her mom. 

A voice that presumably belonged to Blue’s mother called down the stairs: “Calla’s taking it!”  

“I’m in here!” shouted another voice from another direction. This Calla person. 

“In there,” Blue said, pointing in a direction down the hall. “Don’t piss her off.”

“Will you be, um,” Gansey paused to clear his throat, “Joining us?” 

“I’m not psychic,” Blue said. And that was that. 

 

#

 

"Which one of you boys am I reading for?" the scowling woman asked as she shuffled a tarot deck between her hands as confident as a blackjack dealer in Vegas. "Never mind," she snapped when the answer wasn't immediate. "Just sit there and let me think." She started dealing out cards in some imperceptible pattern in front of her with no intervention from them. 

Gansey glanced at Ronan from where they sat almost side-by-side at the round kitchen table. Wasn't exactly a formal or exotic setting for something psychic to happen. With the little telltale sheen of sweat at his temples, Gansey looked nervous, but Ronan thought that might be more at the prospect of being in his crush's house and under the examination of her family more than anything this strange and aggressive woman was doing. 

"Where's the other one of you?" the woman asked, not looking at them, tilting a certain card sideways on the table. Still, it was clear they were supposed to answer this.

"Pardon me, the other who?" Gansey replied, annoyingly proper. 

"The other one of you," the woman repeated, the syllables syncopated for emphasis.

"I -- Noah?" Gansey repeated unsure. "Our other roommate?" 

The woman glared down at the cards, mouth twisted sour. She laid out another card. "No," she said. "Not that one." 

Gansey glanced at Ronan again. Ronan took it as his prompt to come in and be rude. 

"Are you actually going to tell our fortunes or what?" Ronan said. 

She actually raised her eyes to that, and pegged them right onto Ronan's face. "Listen, Snake," she said, like Ronan would find that an insult. "I don't take demands from you and neither do the cards."

He stared back, silent and shitty. 

"We're just not sure we understand what you're saying," Gansey said, the politician. 

The woman snorted. She clipped down three more cards. 

"You're all disjointed," she said. "Missing pieces. Out of order... Before you move forward you need to..." She played out another card. "Come together." Another card. "And stop lying." 

Ronan felt this one pierce him. 

"I don't lie," he said, reactionary. 

The woman looked up again. "That's what a liar says."  

Gansey looked at him too. He didn't like it. 

She began to sweep together the spread cards. "That's it." she said. "We're done."

"Wait, what?" Gansey said, scooting forward in his chair. "I had some specific --"

"I said, that's it. There is no moving forward -- and forward is the future -- before you fix things up."

"But I don't understand what we're supposed to fix!" Gansey countered, then instantly started recounting all the things she had said. "Out of order. Missing pieces?" 

"Pieces. People," the woman said. Her cards were tucked into a neat pile, held within the cage of her hands. "Something like that." She got up and left. 

Gansey was left gaping. 

"What a bunch of bullshit," Ronan said, though he was thrumming with vibrations within. 

A laugh filtered through the kitchen doorway. Blue. "I just knew she was going to eat you alive." 

Not wanting to be forced to witness the awkward flirting, Ronan exited that room, heading towards the front door. He could wait by the car. 

Ronan yanked open the front door. On the other side stood none other than Adam Parrish, arm raised and first formed as if just about the knock. Surprise went on his face faster than it went on Ronan’s.

“What’re you doing here?” Ronan demanded. 

“What’re you doing here?” Parrished countered. 

“I was here to see a psychic,” Ronan answered. 

“So am I,” Parrish said. 

Blue then showed up at the door, probably to inspect whoever Ronan was harassing. It was her home, after all, and not his, and if anyone was going to harass people on the threshold, it was her. 

Seeing Blue, Parrish said in cracking a way that betrayed that he was not entirely confident in his current geographical choice, “Is Persephone available?” 

Blue nodded, seemed to be set in deep understanding of what this moment meant while Ronan was left clueless. 

“I’ll go get her,” Blue said. Then, less nicely, to Ronan, “Stop blocking the door.” 

Ronan dropped his arm, scowled, and stepped out of the way so Parrish could enter. He did enter, shoulders drawn up, clearly not at ease with anything in this situation. 

 

#

 

“Who was that?” Gansey asked, once they were sequestered outside and Parrish had disappeared in.

Ronan stuffed his hands into his jean pockets. “No one.” 

“Do I really have to point out the at least half dozen ways that answer is ridiculous?” Gansey pulled his keyring out of his pocket, absentmindedly twirled them around his finger as he lazed toward his parked camaro.

“You can,” Ronan said. “But it’s not going to help.” He knocked his knuckles against the passenger door window as he waited for Gansey to unlock it. No key fob and automated locks for this baby, just as God intended. 

“Seems local,” Gansey said, taking his time rounding the car. 

“He is,” Ronan said. 

“So you do know him?” 

Ronan could’ve run over his own foot for falling for a trick so stupid. 

“Just get in the goddamn car, Gansey.” 

They got in. After a few failed attempts with the ignition, the Pig started. They drove on for a while, around familiar streets. Gansey badgered him none on the unanswered questions. He knew badgering did nothing to make Ronan honest and everything to make him pissed. 

But Ronan Lynch was Catholic. He could derive his own guilt. 

“He hangs out with Kavinsky,” Ronan said, the exact details of Kavinsky’s and Parrish’s relationship not needed. 

“Oh,” Gansey said, less excited. 

“He’s not a bad guy. He’s more like… in way over his fucking head.” 

“Oh,” Gansey said, in a different tone. 

Nothing else was said. 

“What do you think that psychic meant by all that…”  
“Fucking gibberish?” Ronan filled in. 

Gangsey shook his head. 

“Let’s go pick up Noah,” Ronan said. “Go to Nino’s.”

“But…” Gansey started, then abruptly stopped. 

“Yeah, your favorite fucking waitress isn’t going to be there,” Ronan said. “Sometimes we just go their for the fucking pizza.”

 

#

 

“You’re here again?” Parrish footsteps were as soft as moss. 

Ronan looked up from where he sat at the base between the roots of a great oak-like tree. 

“I’m here a lot,” he said. “You’re the one that’s here again.” 

Parrish sat down beside him, pulled up his knees. “I didn’t even take drugs this time.” 

“So you don’t think this is a trip?” Ronan said. “Then what the fuck is it?”  

“It’s meditation, or something,” Parrish said. “A psychic taught me.” 

The air was filled with a straight sort of cricket song, more melodic than the insects sounded in the actual Virginia forest. The climate air was more temperate too.

“Is that what you were there for?” Ronan asked. 

“Or something,” Parrish replied, elusive. He blinked. “I mentioned before… my headaches…”

“The ones that weren’t actually headaches.”

“Exactly those.” Parish plucked a blade of grass from the ground and played with it between his fingers. “She’s helping me deal with those. Unmedicated.” 

If Parrish would’ve wanted to tell him more, he would’ve volunteered it. So Ronan didn’t ask. Instead, he reached over and plucked the blade of grass from Parrish’s fingers so that he’d had an excuse for their fingers to brush.  

Parrish set his now empty hand atop his knee. Ronan watched its descant and the exact shape his knuckles against the worn patch of his jeans.

“You’re different in here,” Parrish commented. “Whatever here exactly is.” 

“In here is different,” Ronan replied, a cryptic comment he didn’t think he even knew the answer to. 

Parrish shifted beside him. Their knees bumped. Ronan felt on fire. 

“What is it exactly? Here?” Parrish asked. “If you’ve been here so often.” 

“I don’t know. I think it’s always been here. It’s been here as long as I can remember.” He had been coming here since as a child. This place -- these woods -- had always been part of his dreams as far back as he could remember having dreams. 

Parrish yawned. His accent grew thicker now. “I need to go to sleep. This might be your dream, but like I said, I’m only --”

“Meditating. Yeah.” 

Parrish looked around for a moment before leaning forward. He plucked the head off a strange, strip-petaled flower. He held it out towards Ronan. Ronan, despite himself, held his can out to receive it. Adam dropped it in his cupped palms. 

“Here,” he said. “Bring me this in the real world. Then I’ll believe it. Something that nice doesn’t exist in Henrietta.” 

Ronan curled his fingers around he bloom. The petals were soft, delicate velvet. “Where do I give it to you?”

Parrish smiled a smile lighter than Ronan had ever seen of him in real life, on the topside. “Don’t you know my schedule? You’re my stalker after all.”

“I’m not your…” He shook his head. Parrish was smiling wider. Adam Parrish could call Ronan Lynch anything he wanted. 

“I’m going to Blue’s house again, tomorrow. 5:30 in the afternoon. Meet me there.”

Ronan stared down at the flower in his hands for a long time and then back up. Parrish was gone. 

Ronan woke up, slow at first and stiff as a board. Then, completely. He had a flower in his hand. He laid it loose on his chest and stared down at the thing, delicate and perfectly proportioned in a way no flower actually grew in nature’s true confines and ravages. Nothing in this side of the existence grew without flaws. Life was too hard for that. 

 

#

 

The sky spitting down drizzle-like rain. Ronan’s shoulders were hunched under his leather jacket, his hand stuck in the pocket where the flower bloom was being harbored. 

Behind him a door opened and shut, then heavy-booted feet clunked down a set of wooden porch stairs. 

Coming to stand beside him in the rain, Blue said, “Why are you loitering outside my house? For an hour?” 

Ronan said, “I’m waiting for someone.”

“Adam,” she asked obviously. 

He said nothing. 

“I don’t think he’s coming,” Blue said. 

Again, Ronan said nothing. 

“Around 4:30, Persephone -- my kind of aunt -- stood up from the kitchen table and announced it. That he wasn’t coming. Not because she got a phone call. Because she’s psychic, it was like she just kind of knew --” 

“I get it.”

“No need to snap while you’re trespassing.” 

Ronan didn’t apologize but he also didn’t swear at her so it was sort of the same thing. Blue seemed to understand his language. 

“Adam and I,” she said. “We’ve gone to the same school our whole lives. I never really knew him. Just vaguely aware of him. He’s troubled. His life is… hard. He’s never really had any friends. I mean, neither have I, but I have this lot.” She jerks her head to indicate to her house behind them. “He hasn’t… I’m glad he has a friend now.”

It took Ronan a second to realize Blue was talking about him. Not many people claimed to label him as a friend. 

His fingers curled around the flower in his pocket, smashed it flat. 

“That’s fine and fucking dandy and all that,” Ronan said, taking a step away from her and towards his car, parked down the block. “But friends show up.”

 

#

 

When Ronan dreamed that night, Adam wasn’t there. And not the next. Or the next. Or the next. 


	9. Chapter 9

Adam Parrish should know better than to expect good things to last. This time the streak was only a couple of days: a dream, a kiss, a mystery to be solved, a clear head, a visit with a psychic, another dream, and a tentative plan. Adam could map that out, the leaping lines that jumped between them, interweaving. 

It all ended when he came back to the trailer park that has always been called his home. He didn’t call it home with any sort of warmth, but because there was nothing else better to replace it with. Not a word or a place. Still, that day and at that moment, he felt lighter on his own feet. He was going to shower after his half-shift at Boyd's before going to his meeting with Persephone. And Ronan. 

Lynch, he corrected mentally. 

Ronan Lynch. 

No, Ronan. 

Then he stepped inside the trailer where the tension was as thick as pulp. And he had walked right into it. In more ways than one. 

"What did you think you were doing?" Robert Parrish said in a way that was not a question, but an accusation, condemnation, and sentencing all wrapped into one. "Hiding money from us?"

The evidence was clear. Adam’s father had the cash itself in hand. They had found his shoe box. The one he had taken out the other day and had been too distracted to be put away all the way. Adam was lucky, he guessed, in one sense that they had been too distracted by the money to pay much attention the rest of the contents. 

Adam's eyes flickered past his father, past the mass of the man standing right up in his space and vision, to his mother, far back in the corner of the room. Watching, but out of the line of fire. She, after all, wasn't the one Robert was angry with at this singular moment in time. 

The question Robert had posed wasn't one that required an answer. It was, in fact, a question with no right answer, truth or liar or diversion. So Adam stayed quiet. He stayed quiet like he always stayed quiet. Because fighting and protesting and arguing just made it worse. He shut his eyes, and this first explosion of pain flared like a firework. 

 

#

 

"Damn," K said upon seeing him. Less sympathy, more shocked observation. All he did was roll down his window. He didn’t get out of the car. He didn’t even open the door. 

Adam could only make it down to the cluster of mailboxes at the end of the drive at the entrance of the trailer park. Only could make it there after limping to neighbor who was sympathetic enough to help to let Adam use a phone but apathetic enough to not get involved beyond that. 

He ended up collapsed-sitting on the ground when Kavinsky finally showed up. 

"Shut up," Adam replied. He didn't have the energy to say anything more, to pretend to be more. 

Kavinsky clicked a button to unlock the passenger door. Sympathetic enough to answer his call; apathetic enough to have nothing else to say. Adam climbed in.

A few months ago, Adam wouldn't have had anyone to call, so there was that. 

 

#

 

Adam shoved a wandering hand away off of his hip. "Not in the mood," he grunted. His face throbbed with pain where it was bruised. His ribs ached. His shoulders ached. He had twisted an ankle when he had fallen under the barrage of his father's fists, and that hurt too. 

Kavinsky rolled away beside him, the mattress shifting. 

"Bet you'd be in the mood if I was Lynch."

Adam was already stiff, but he went stiffer. 

"Think I'm blind, Parrish? Think I don't see you two sneaking off and whispering to each other little girls?" 

Kavinsky rolled over further and ruffled through a cabinet at his bedside, rolled back with a joint. 

Adam said nothing. After all, that's what he did. He stayed quiet. 

He didn't ask: Are you bothered by this? He didn't ask: Why aren't you mad? He never questioned why someone wasn't mad.

Kavinsky maybe knew the questions that lingered unspoken by the very fact of him stating his observation about his boyfriend and another guy. He took a long drag on his joint. "You're not with him now," he said. Right now, when Adam Parrish was broken and low. "You're here."

 

#

 

He hid out in K’s house for the next three days. 

Whenever Adam got hurt worse than could be plausibly explained by the excuse of being a teenage boy, he avoided school and the public. It was the same this time, except this time he had a place away from the trailer park to sleep off his misery. K left him alone as he went to school and hung out with his friends and did whatever else he did when he wasn’t living in his godforsaken mansion.   

Adam only left the bedroom for food runs to the kitchen. K’s room had everything else: a tv, a video game console, and an actual en suite bathroom. He lived in K’s clothes. 

Truth was Adam didn’t want to go wandering around with K wasn’t home and run into his mom. He had overheard K and her have screaming matches through several layers of walls before, but most of the time it was like she haunted the place. A figment Adam at most caught glimpses of, phantom footsteps, and randomly slammed doors. One of K’s drugged up things. He didn’t favor the comparison. 

Three days, and a lot it in silence and in solitude, and he couldn’t meditate a lick. Not like Persephone had taught him. He couldn’t get into that dream forest. It took peace of mind, and though Adam Parrish might be stalling in place, he was hardly at peace. 

On his second night there, he asked K, “Do you have any more those green pills?”

Kavinsky looked him straight in the eye and said, “No.” Adam at the feeling it was a lie even if K was unwavering, but he didn’t have much ground to stand on for protest or any ground to retreat to. 

So he said, “Okay,” and sunk back into the pillows. 

Facts were in a few days his bruises would fade and soften. They wouldn’t look quite as harsh or hurt quite as much. That he knew because this had happened as routine over and over again. That wasn’t the unknown part. What he didn’t know, what he doubted, was if the trailer was a place he could go back to. 

He had pissed his father off real bad. He had stayed out for longest stretch of days straight now. And while his dad had been focused on the money, that shoebox had other incriminating things. Who knew what his dad would notice, get fired up over, once this first rage had settled. 

What’s next, Adam had to wonder. For him. He had all these long term plans. Ones were he was supposed to keep his head down and work hard and eventually, maybe, possibly, get what he wanted out of it: college admission, a scholarship, a path forever out of this town. 

Now his short term plans were all asunder and he didn’t know if he still had a home. K’s house was a temporary sheltered. Everything with Kavinsky had felt temporary from the very first start. K liked fast cars and fast drinking and reckless living. Adam was careful and planned, and pseudo-dating Kavinsky was the most dangerous thing he had ever done. He always figured K would get bored with him at some point. 

Maybe Adam would get fed up and walk away first. He should, but he was short on allies. And now that he had one, he was reluctant to give it up despite not knowing how long it would last.  

 

#

 

“Hey.” A casual slap landed on his thigh. “You still afraid to show your face, asshole?”

Adam sat up on the bed. “You want to go somewhere?”

“Out,” Kavinsky said. He pulled a shirt on over his head. “I get fucking itchy hanging out around here all the time.”

It didn’t sound awful. Adam had to get out of this bed, this room, this house at some point. Practice living again. Figure out what he was going to do next. Whatever he was doing, he didn’t feel like he could just keep doing it, on and on and on. 

“Get dressed, fucker,” Kavinsky said. “We’re heading out in five.” 

So Adam got out of bed, got dressed, and proceeded to ride along shotgun in Kavinsky’s car and life. For all his ills, that’s what K had: a life. Half his friends might be sycophants, but that was still more friendship than was in Parrish’s meter. K’s hobbies all might be razor-thin and self-destructive, but it was stuff -- cars, racing, parties -- that he derived his type of joy from. He might be angry, but at least he wasn’t afraid to let himself feel shit. 

“What’re we doing here?” Adam said, cranning his head up to take in the looming of the Aglionby buildings as they pulled up the drive. 

“Dorm party tonight. A good place for business, but only the soft stuff. All these shitheads are too worried about getting busted to let it get that fun.” 

Adam Parrish hadn’t wanted to get his insider’s glimpse into Aglionby Academy this way, but chances were slimming that he would get to see it any other way. Without any haranguing, he climbed out of the car following K. 

The dorms were built in Jeffersonian style, brick walls with Corinthian columns at the entry painted in pure white. Inside, the fixings were in dark wood, old and hand-carved, and smoothed down from years of touching. In Adam’s day-to-day life old things were just worn out. In a place like this old things were dignified and exclusive. He touched the doorframe. He probably wouldn’t’ve have a chance to touch it again. 

In that moment lingered, Adam was separated from Kavinsky. The halls were full of people, dorm room doors left open. He could wait where he was, for Kavinsky to come back. Wait there like a child lost in the woods. Or he could dive in. For a moment, Adam could pretend he belonged here. That he was invited. 

If that pretend was too big, at least for a moment he could just be here. Adam plunged into the party.

“Jungle juice?” said some guy, shoving a solo cup of the concoation in front of Parrish in offering. Maybe he vaguely recognized him from one of K’s parts; maybe he just lived by the philosophy of more people drunk the more fun the party would be. Adam could smell the strength of the alcohol in the cup without even trying. 

He edged around the extended offering. “No, thanks.” 

He had been turning down a lot lately. Weed. Alcohol. He had been out from under the influence for about a week now. Since he visited Persephone about being maybe, possibly, actually psychic. About the idea the maybe, possible, actual idea that his visions weren’t him going crazy, but him being in touch with something bigger. And maybe, possible, actually that didn’t have to be a bad thing, a thing that distracted him from his plans, but an addition to them. Maybe Adam Parrish was special. Maybe Adam Parrish could be part of something bigger. 

Everything had gone to shit since then and even though that was the perfect time and excuse to retreat back into bad habits and self-medication, he hadn’t wanted to. Those things didn’t actually make him feel better. Temporarily, sure. But their was the hangover. The come down. Then the looking in the mirror and in the back of your own head and wondering how you had gotten here. Straight-edge to mess. 

Joseph Kavinsky could pull off mess. So could any of the boys hanging around this dorm. When you were rich and privileged being a mess was an aesthetic. When you were poor it was a stereotype.  

All around him were boys in nice clothes with nice haircuts, hanging around outside their dorm rooms which showed glimpses of mini-fridges, flat screen televisions, and personal computers. Boys talking about polo and crew, Latin class and summer vacations to France, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cancun like they were mundane. Like they were the things people just talked about without it laced with envy and aspiration. Adam began to feel dizzy in the mix of it. Felt invisible vines crawling up his legs, reaching from his spine, ready to pull him in. Under. 

Then a familiar voice cut through:

“Christ, Matthew, why did you ask me here on the night of this shitfest?... No, I don’t think it’s fun. When have I ever liked these people?” 

Adam jerked. His eyes sought to find. Found they did. Ronan Lynch, down the hall, talking to someone inside one of the open-doored dorms. 

He must’ve felt Adam’s eyes on him in that uncanny way humans knew when they were being watched. He turned, looked, found Adam in the crowd. He didn’t betray an inch of emotion. He also didn’t look away. He never looked away. 

Until he did. 

Ronan lowered his gaze, said something unhearable to the person in the dorm room, turned, and walked away. It was an action Adam witnessed and it felt like a fiery arrow to his gut. 

Over and over again, Ronan had come to Adam, sought him out, broke the first ice of contact or conversation. One time Adam had planned to meet him and then didn't show. There were extenuating circumstances. Adam knew that; Ronan didn't. 

Over and over, Ronan had come to him. Never once had it been the opposite. 

Adam pushed off against the wall and weaved his way through the crowd. He wasn't the type of person people parted for, or the person that pushed through. He was the type of person people bumped into and then didn't even bother to apologize. If Ronan was really determined to get away from him, Adam never would’ve caught up. 

The crowd thinned as Adam pushed outside. Ronan was on the lawn, probably headed to his car, black against the night where it was parked along the drive. 

"Wait," Adam called out. 

At least, out of everything, Ronan waited. 

Adam jogged up the last few steps. He felt very out of breath when he finally stopped in front of the boy he had just chased out of a party. For a moment all the had was their shared breathes, impossibly loud in the fresh, night air between them. 

Adam had yelled wait; it was Adam's turn to talk. 

"I haven't been able to get to the forest," he said. "I've tried to meditate, but everything in my head is so fucked up right now."

Ronan said nothing. Adam pressed his dry-chapped lips together, thinking. What else was he supposed to say: 'Sorry I stood you up, but I was busy getting the shit beat out of me.'

Adam flinched at the sudden touch of Ronan’s cold fingers on the side of his face. He had thought of all of Ronan Lynch ran hot, figurative and literal, but not it his fingertips, it turned out. 

With little pressure, Ronan’s touch tilted Adam’s head up for inspection.

“Who gave you the shiner?” he asked. 

Adam’s lungs felt locked in a cage. He had healed up a lot, but a bruise as bad as the one he had took days to fade completely. 

“K?” Ronan asked when Adam was now the one to say nothing. 

“No,” Adam said, fast and easy. “He’s not like that. He’s a lot of things, but not that.”

That accusation was out of the way, but Ronan’s original question still hung in the air. He wouldn’t ask it twice. Adam hadn’t even given it an answer once. The truth of his homelife wasn’t something he told people. He, in fact, never told anyone. People usually just figured it out, from the signs, the context clues, the patterns. Some even from witness. Robert Parrish was a rageful thing and there were plenty of people who knew it, just as there were plenty of people who knew what it meant when a child had regular bruises he couldn’t’ve gotten from kickball and bicycles. 

So, he didn’t say it because he thought he owed it to Ronan. He definitely didn’t say it because he wanted pity. He never wants that. 

He said it because he wanted to prove that with all the steps toward him Ronan had made, Adam was willing to make one too. 

“It’s why I don’t like to spend a lot of time at home.”

He came at it sideways because signals... patterns. Still, he watched the understanding come across Ronan’s sharp and angular features: Confusion morphing into shock morphing into anger.  

So this moment had crossed. 

“Oi, Parrish. We’re leaving!”  Kavinsky. The voice could almost make him wince. The souring mix in to right now. He didn’t need his progress dragged back. 

Adam didn’t move. Didn’t turn around.

“That’s your ride,” Ronan said. In his voice it was clear that he thought he already knew the decision Adam was going to make. 

Still, Adam didn’t move. Didn’t turn around. 

K yelled again: “Gonna leave your ass if you don’t hurry the fuck up!”

Adam turned. Shouted back, “Then leave!”

Kavinsy wasn’t the jealous type, at least not over Adam Parrish. What about Adam Parrish was there to be jealous over? 

“Fuck you!” K’s car was loud and vicious as it tore off. 

Ronan Lynch had his eyebrows raised; it was as good as words. 

“I wanted to figure out what’s happening,” Adam said. “With your dreams. My visions. That impossible forest… So, right now, I’m here.” With you.

 

#

 

They stayed up the entire night through in the front seats of Ronan’s car. Sometimes talking, sometimes driving, sometimes just looking up at the night sky full of country stars. Never touching. 

Adam usually felt that he never got enough sleep. This night he didn’t miss sleep at all. 

“I’ve always been this way,” Ronan said. 

“It’s only started recently for me,” Adam confided in return, referring to the things he used to call headaches but Persephone insisted were psychic visions. 

“I can barely control it,” Ronan said. 

“Me either,” Adam replied. 

Ronan: “I don’t know what the forest is. It’s just there.” 

Adam: “I don’t know how I got to the forest. I just did.” 

Come morning light, they worn out all words on the strangeness of their lives, the contours of the supernatural that fit around theirs hours and plans.They didn’t talk about the kiss, or the touch, or the static that had long ago formed and still hovered between them, and when they weren’t in the same place, in their heads. 

The closest they ever got was this: 

“I still don’t fucking get the thing between you and Kavinsky.” 

Adam shrugged under his seatbelt. “There’s nothing to get,” he said. “It’s contractual. He’s lonely and angry, and I’m… just as lonely and angry. The other difference is he’s rich and I’m not.”

Ronan reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror, and readjusted it again, a delicate action for rough hands.

“You’re worth more than that,” he said. And nothing more. No scripted romantic listing fill-in-the-blank attributes about that worth. But Adam had gotten enough of a feel for this guy that he didn’t need some spilled out list. That Ronan voiced whatever worth he saw was proof enough of it. 

“Well… I don’t get why you’re friends,” Adam said.

“We’re not friends.” 

“You sure hang out with him a lot.” 

Ronan gave Adam a long look -- his counterargument. 

“You were hanging out with him before you met me,” Adam added. 

“I guess I’m angry too,” Ronan said. “And he’s safe to get angry with.”

Adam scoffed. “Safe?”

“That I wouldn’t ruin anything too important.”

Through the windshield, dawn turned into proper morning. 

Ronan ran a hand over his face. “Fuck, there’s school today.”

Adam plucked at his seatbelt. “I guess you should take me home.” 

Ronan stared him straight through the side of the head; Adam stared resolutely forward. 

“You can’t go back there.”

There was no need to ask why. To what he was referring.

“Yes, you can,” Adam said. No matter, he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t know if he had permanently burned his bridges with Kavinsky, but he felt the wires getting thin, from both of them. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve been dealing with this for seventeen years. You’ve been dealing with it for a few hour.” 

But he wasn’t going to stay there, he decided. His dad should be gone at work soon, and Adam needed to get in the trailer to get all the stuff he had left behind when he retreated from it: clothes, school bag, bicycle. Where he’d go after that, he wasn’t sure. School and then work and the somewhere. He wasn’t sure of a lot of things right now, and for someone who was usually so planned that should be frightening. Instead, the wide open, unsure future was freeing.

Ronan was quiet. And then, “Fuck. Anyone ever tell you you’re frustrating?”

Adam said, a bubble of laugh caught in his chest, “They’ve told me worse.” 


	10. Chapter 10

Kavinsky was stirred from his sleep with the absurdity of the clunk of knocking on his bedroom door. Who knocked on his bedroom door? Who was in his fucking house?

He dragged himself from bed, grumbling and groaning. Because at least this bullshit was a mystery. 

He pulled open the the door only to see the traitor fucking extraordinaire, Adam Fucking Parrish. 

“What’re you doing here?” he said around a yawn. 

“The front was unlocked,” Parrish said. “And I left some of my stuff here.” 

“You’ve got a love balls, shithead,” K said, “After blowing me off last night.”

“You’ve left me on the side of road for less,” Parrish replied in what was a solid rebuttal. 

“Shit,” Kavinsky said. His head was fuzzy with just waking up and whatever he had imbibed in the night before. “I give you rides. I let you get your mail sent to my house. I come when you fucking call. Let you sleep under my goddamn roof --” 

“Put a roof over my head?” Parrish snorted. “What’re you, my father now?”

Parrish was unusually combative for the start of the conversation. He had been getting more combative as the days had passed. 

Kavinsky put up an arm on the doorframe, blocking Adam’s entry. Preventing him from moving past where he was. 

“I’m infamous in this town and I’m still not as big of an asshole as your father.” 

He watched Parrish’s jaw clenched. He liked him rackled. He liked most people more when they were rackled. 

“Can I get my shit?” Parrish said. 

“Go ahead,” Kavinsky said, but didn’t move this arm. 

Parrish twitched, a repressed motion. 

“I said go ahead,” K repeated louder. “Go get your shit. Just got to shove me out of the way first.” 

Parrish said nothing. Didn’t even look at him straight on. 

“Push me,” K said. “Punch me. Do what you need.”

Parrish continued glowering into the middle distance. What would break this guy? Not in the silent way he came slinking around after his father gave him bruises. In the fun way. The explosive way. The Lynch way.

“Why do you have to be such a fucking asshole all the time?” Parrish said, jaw gritted.

“Why do you have to be a pussy?”

Parrish glowered. 

“Christ.” Kavinsky dropped his arm. “Go get your shit.” Adam squeezed past with urgency. Kavinsky called at his back, “Why the fuck do you have to be so boring all the time? I don’t know what Lynch sees in you.”  
Adam froze in his act grabbing his clothes off the floor. His actual ones, not the ones of K’s he borrow and didn’t fit right in. Clothes that were worn and faded like rags. Clothes someone like K would throw away without a thought or buy for a shit ton of money if a designer put it out artificially distressed. 

“It’s not like that,” Adam said. “I’m not doing this for him. I’m doing this for me.” 

He might’ve liked his drugs and his alcohol, his parties and his recklessness, but Kavinsky wasn’t stupid. Not in all matters. Not in people, and the things they needed and the things they feared and how the social order fit together. Not in the important things that dictated the control of the world: money, power, and fear. Kavinsky had watched how his father had weilded those his entire short life thus far. A silent study, the powerless one knowing he would one day come into his inheritance. 

There were a lot of rich kids at Aglionby, almost all of them. But in terms of power and fear, Kavinsky had carved out a kingdom in Henrietta. Only traitors walked away from a king. 

“No,” Kavinsky said at Adam’s back, jaw tight. “You don’t get to dump me. Someone like you doesn’t get to walk away from someone like me.” 

“Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t,” Parrish said, head ducked.  

Fuck Parrish. Fuck him throwing back K’s own words right in his face. That was playing dirty -- throwing sand in the eyes during a fistfight. 

“I’m not fucking pretending,” Kavinsky spat. “I’m the one who gets to get tired of you. You think you’re better than me, you fucking piece of trailer trash?”

All this, and Parrish still didn’t return his anger. It was frustrating for K, and made him madder, but there was nowhere satisfying to fling that anger. He just stood there seething, an internal vortex of flame. 

“I don’t think I’m better than you,” Parrish said, too calm. 

How dare he? How dare he be fucking calm at this precipice. 

Parrish stepped forward, close to him, slow, like Kavinsky was a wild animal. In many ways he was. “We’re both fucks up, K. And whatever good we did for each other is out matched by all the bad. I’m tired…” His accent came out on full force on that word:  _ tired _ . 

Parrish placed a hand on the side of his face. K wanted to slap it away, but he resisted. The last bit of self control he had left. 

“You helped me survive these last months,” Parrish said. “But I want to do more than survive. And for that… I just don’t think this is the right place for me to be.”

Kavinsky stepped back from him, glowering. Parrish gathered up the rest of his things. There weren’t much of them. A few spare t-shirts, a school textbook, a few pages of notebook paper filled with Parrish’s scrawl. Things that could be easily replaced if you weren’t living with Parrish’s non-existent budget. 

Once he was done, he ducked past Kavinsky, having said all he had planned to say. 

At the end of the hall, just short of the stairs, K yelled at the shape of his back: “Fuck you, Parrish.” 

Parrish raised a hand as if waving, accepting the sentiment. 

K added, “Where are you gonna go now?” 

Parrish barely tilted his head. “I’ll figure it out.”

Would K miss him? Adam Parrish of all people, the pathetic wretch. Full of cold-blooded sarcasm that slipped in through the unexpected cracks. A brainiac nerd with no where to focus the energy. Melancholy on the surface with a core of anger and passion that Kavinsky could never quite manage to pop, to make explode. Warm and touch-hungry. And there. On some mornings, or evenings, or long afternoons, when Joseph Kavinsky was alone in this big fucking house, and all the emptiness and sharp angles of the world were ready to crush down on him. 

Would Kavinsky miss Adam Parrish, boring and fascinating and strong enough to walk away? 

No. Of course not. 

At least, you could never get him to admit to it.    

  


#

  


The game as going too slow. Joseph Kavinsky burned with unfilled need. Sex, drugs, racing, dreams, fireworks. It was never enough to fill up the ransacked hollows where in his chest where his internal organs were supposed to be. 

Was anyone else in the world as restless as him?

Yes. One. Ronan Lynch. That dense motherfucker. Hot as shit. With fists that itched for a fight. Feet that itched for a gas pedal. Soul that itched for sinning. A contradictory mess of desire and repression. 

A dreamer, too. 

Joseph Kavinsky always felt oddly attached to his dreams. Like he could touch them, manipulate them, make them. More than every high motherfucker who wanted to share their weird ass dream story. His difference was different. 

His dreams, somehow, could be made real. 

Then he and his mother were forcefully relocated to this assbackward town, and he discovered his dreams had become richer, thicker. The things he could draw out here bigger, better, more specific. The was a silver lining to this town and it showed up when he was asleep. 

This town served up another delicious surprise for Kavinsky too, a fellow dreamer in the tattered soul of Ronan Lynch.

Ronan Lynch, who was slamming his car door shut right now. 

“The fuck you want me to come all the way out here for?” he shouted as he approached. 

Kavinsky raised his sunglasses from his nose, propping them up on his head. For all Lynch’s protests and denials, if K badgered, annoyed, tantalized, and teased Lynch in the right ways, he showed. 

“I want to show you something, dickhead!” K shouted back. 

Lynch stopped an arm’s distance away. Was that for his own protection or for K’s? Lynch was quick with swinging fists, although, not lately.

“Any fucking time today,” Lynch said. 

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?” K said. 

Lynch stared at him silent, wearing an expression of neutral distaste. His casual, everyday stinkface. 

“It’s a graveyard,” Kavinsky said, but it didn’t even get a twitch of reaction of him. Whatever. He’d get his precious reaction soon. 

He jerked his head in the direction to follow, and walked around the shrubs that blocked the evidence of his mastery of work from obvious view. He walked half sideways so he wouldn’t miss the glorious expression crack through on Lynch’s face when he finally saw it, and then when it sunk in and he finally understood. 

The two of them stepped onto the edge of a field of cars -- misshapen or mishappened or destroyed mitsubishi's, attempts at his exact model, white skin and knife graphic. 

Lynch’s mouth parted, hint of slack-jawed surprise. 

“How?” he said, just a ghost of a word. 

“You know,” Kavinsky said. “You know. Just say it.”

Lynch gritted his jaw, an action opposite of his previous reaction. A decision. He was silent. He didn’t say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ like a liar. He just didn’t say anything at all. 

“Fucker,” K said. “Just say it. And admit that you and me are more alike than anyone else. More than you and Dick the Third. Than you and  _ Parrish _ .” He spat ‘Parrish’ with all the venom he felt in his soul.

“Shut your mouth.”

Judging from the expression on Lynch’s face, he hadn’t meant for the words to explode out. He had meant to play stoic and brutal.

Kavinsky smirked, incisors showing. Christ, he loved pushing Lynch’s buttons. It was so easy and so satisfying. 

“Really?” He said. “Parrish?” He had goaded Lynch on this point, before but why not more. He had just played his hand here with the field of mitsubishis. Here was the time to push all the fucking more. “I was sure you were sucking Dick’s dick, but it’s trailer boy who gets you going?” 

“Why do you talk so much shit about your own boyfriend?” 

Kavinsky laughed, high and loud and manufactured. “Haven’t you heard?” He asked, although it was clear that Lynch was confused. Christ, he was slow on the uptake sometimes. “We’re over. I dumped his ass.”

Lynch turned around, like he was offended by the very sight of Kavinsky. 

K stepped forward, grabbed his arm, jerked him back around. 

“You don’t you get it. This isn’t about him. It’s never been. He’s nothing. He’s not this --” He waved a wild arm at the cars. This was supposed to be the jackpot, the thing all this had led to. The teasing. The dreams things. The slid in innuendo. And here he had laid out this last proof, and here was Lynch, not biting. 

“You’re the one who doesn’t fucking get it,” Lynch said, and took a step back, a movement of leaving. 

No. 

No, this wasn’t how this play was supposed to go. It wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. 

“Walk away now and you’re walking away from all the fucking answers,” K said. “For good. Don’t think about coming fucking crawling back.” 

Ronan said three words as the sucker punch of him choosing his choice in K’s ultimatum: “I’ll fucking manage.” 

For the second time that day, someone had walked away from Joseph Kavinsky. And he was once again alone. 

  


#

  


He could break something. He could break someone’s neck. He could set the world on fire. 

Lynch would come crawling back, that he was sure. He knew shit about what he could do with dreams and the power that flew deep in this town. He needed Kavinsky. Kavinsky was needed. Lynch would get bored of Parrish. He was as restless as K, needed someone to stoke that fire, keep it fed. 

Yes, Lynch would come crawling back. And Kavinsky would make him pay for it when it did. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hadn't planned from the outset to right a chapter from Kavinsky's perspective, but when I got to this point, it just felt right. Got to say that I oddly enjoyed it. He has a very chaotic mind. (Actually, this is my first TRC fic that I've written Kavinsky at all.) 
> 
> We're in the home stretch folks.


	11. Chapter 11

“Steady on, Ronan,” said a voice in Ronan’s head. Not his own. It was a deep voice, mature, and had a lilt to it. It was like his father’s. “Steady on.” 

He was trying to remain steady. Steady as he turned his back on Kavinsky and his cars even as his pulse thrummed through his ears. Steady as he sat behind the wheel of the beemer and eased on the gas pedal. Steady despite the fact that Ronan Lynch was made up of a series of tectonic plates, crashing together, creating earthquakes. 

He had started out calm as he drove away from Kavinsky’s field of cars -- his field of evidence. Sure, money could buy that in theory, but not the money a teenage boy had access to. Not even rich ones. 

It had been teased for a while, the shared truth of it. What Kavinsky and him could both do. Ronan saw it every time he shut his eyes he saw a pile of glowing rocks on the hood of his BMW. The scratches were still visible in the wax. 

He drove. His brain wasn’t in charge. He drove. Some deeper, baser, more intuitive instinct took over. He drove. 

Then, he was stopping. He didn’t stop anywhere he thought his instincts would lead him. Not Monmouth, or the Barns, or even Aglionby, or outside the autobody shop that Adam worked. No, he was on a quaint little street with old, wooden houses separated by nature-ragged lawns. A neighborhood was what one would’ve associated with a small town except worn and stripped of its postcard varnish. More particularly, he had stopped in front of an eggshell blue house he had been twice before. Sargent’s house. The psychic’s house. 

His pulse was still racing, but like the cool down now. Like he had finished a race. He didn’t like anyone that lived in that house except Sargent perhaps forty-nine percent of the time. But he was here for some reason, and he had just seen a field full of cars, and he could pull things from his dreams, and he had always been a stubborn believer. So he was here, it would seem, for a reason. 

He got out of the car. He walked up the porch steps, kicking the back of each step on his way up. He didn’t knock; the door opened anyway. 

“About time,” said the woman on the other side. She had hair like a cloud and big glasses. “I’m Persephone.” 

So this was the psychic Adam had been meeting with. She was weirder than the other one.

“Come in,” she said, gracious and commanding in one. Ronan went in, still feeling like he was being moved along by a current greater than himself. She led him up a creaky set of stairs to what she called ‘the drawing room.’ 

She at them at a table by a window. From somewhere on her person she procured a deck of tarot cards. She set them on the table between them. 

“If you would please cut the deck. As many time as you want. And then put them back together.” 

Ronan, being shitty, sat there for a long time doing an unmovable imitation of lead statue, then reached out, cut the deck in about exactly half, then put the top half right back on the bottom of the half. The deck was in the exact same order as before he had touched it. 

“If you think that didn’t imbue the cards with your personality…” Persephone said, but there was no irritation in her. That lack of irritation irritated Ronan in turn. 

“Three cards,” Persephone said. “Is all we need. Past. Present. Future.” She dealt out three cards, face down. “We start with the past…” Her fingers hovered over the card. With her eyes shut behind her magnifying glasses, she flipped it. “Ten of Cups,” she said, although Ronan had no fucking idea if she was right. This wasn’t exactly hearts and spades. “Peace. Joy. Unity. Family.” 

Ronan tangled his fingers at the leather bracelets at his wrist. 

“Now onto present.” She flipped the middle card. “Six of swords. You’re in a transition period, necessary but painful.” 

Her hovering hand moved over to the third card as Ronan crossed his arms in front of himself. He had stormed away from lesser situations that had prodded at his sore spots, but he felt unusually cemented here. 

“Future,” Persephone announced as she flipped this card. Then she blinked. She blinked again. “Oh my,”  she said. Instead of telling Ronan anything about this ‘oh my’ or the card or any of the rest of this bullshit, she flipped another card over from the deck. And then another. And then another after that.  

“I thought you said three cards was all we needed!” Ronan said. 

Persephone then, of all things available in the universe, shushed him. 

She flipped over one more card, then leaned back in her chair as if this little exact distance would help her observe them and their meaning somewhat more. 

“The cards are offering a very… pointed piece of guidance for your future,” she said. “More specific than predications usually lend themselves. I hope this impresses the importance on you.” She looked over the rim of her glasses at him. 

“Can you just get on with it.” He was antsy. He wanted to leave. He couldn’t leave yet. 

Persephone cleared her throat. “Make sure everyone gets on the helicopter.”

“What?” he snapped. He had choicer words he didn’t say. 

She tapped the Six of Swords. “Transition. Things are out of order. They need to be put in order… The cards’ advice for that is for you to make sure everyone gets on the helicopter.” 

‘Out of order,’ Ronan thought. He’d heard that before. But more pressing. “What helicopter?” 

“How would I know what helicopter?” Persephone asked. 

Ronan made a stabby gesture with his hands towards the splay of cards. 

“They don’t get that specific. If they did, don’t you think I would’ve won the lottery by now?” 

Now Ronan was just pissed. It was an easy state to get him in.

“I’m leaving,” he said, standing up quick. Whatever weird daze that had dragged him here was dissipated. 

“Give it ten seconds,” Persephone said. 

“What?” he snapped. 

“Nine. Eight. Seven --”

He stormed out. Out of the room, down the steps, to the front door. He yanked it open. And who was on the other side, on the porch, ready to knock but not having yet knocked, very much like Ronan had been about a quarter of an hour ago, but Adam Parrish. 

Ronan had to pull himself back from the momentum of storming out or he would’ve barreled Adam right over. Plus, leaving didn’t seem too pressing now that the company had approved. Adam, probably shocked by the sudden door opening in his face and the person behind it, had no words either. They had been in this position before.

“What’re you doing here?” Adam said, after managing to get his wits about him first. 

“What’re you?” Ronan countered, although Ronan had fucking guess that Adam had more right to be here than him. 

Adam blinked. “I -- I was just biking… to the store. And something just lead me here instead. I’ve been trying to go along with those hunches lately.”

“Do you need to come in?” It wasn’t Ronan’s house to do the inviting, but he was blocking the door. 

Adam shook his head. “No. I think I found what I was meant to find.” 

They went for a walk. It was a strange thing for them. Low stakes. Not a party, not alcohol, not a fast revving engine. Unless Joseph Kavinsky came a lot out of his way, he wasn’t going to be interrupting this.

Speaking of the literal devil... 

“I heard about you and Kavinsky,” Ronan said as they approached the end of the block. He kicked at a weed growing up between a crack in the sidewalk. “Being over.” 

“From Kavinsky?” Adam asked. 

“Yeah.” 

Adam scoffed. “I bet that was flattering.”

“He said he dumped you.”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“Fuck. No?”

Adam shook his head. Temporarily paused under the shade of an oak, Adam’s face and shoulders were dappled with the breakthroughs of sunlight through the branches and leaves. Standing there looking at him, Ronan was split in two -- forward and back, past and future, a sense of impossible deja vu, because when had he ever seen Parrish like this, and a longing, simmering like a campfire. 

“I’ve been on a self improvement kick,” Adam said. “No inebriation. Follow my psychic urges, or whatever they are. Get out of the bad relationship… Move away from my parents.” 

“Shit,” Ronan said. “Have you?”

“Another part of my self improvement kick is swallowing my shame and asking for help. I don’t have an actual place to live yet, but I’ve got a couch. My boss at the auto body shop, Boyd… He’s a good guy. So I have a place to sleep until I figure something out more permanent. So… if you have any suggestions…” He scrapped the sole of his shoe along the sidewalk, the same as his voice scrapped along his throat, as if he had to scrap of this out. Being vulnerable enough to ask for help was hard. 

“Shit,” Ronan said, after a moment’s thought and a sudden idea. “I might.” 

 

#

 

“Noah.” Ronan slammed the door shut. 

Noah blinked. “Me?” 

“Him?” Gansey asked in echo. 

Ronan stopped in the middle of the room, feet spread wide. “You said something weeks ago when you were being all fucking weird.” 

Noah blinked again. It was a good argument. Ronan wasn’t being specific enough for Noah was always weird. 

“Everything is out of order,” Ronan said. 

“Hey,” Gansey said. “That’s the same thing --”

“The crazy psychic said, yeah,” Ronan agreed. 

“I’m sure it’s just a coincidence,” Gansey said, a reasonable adult answer around a tone that was an eccentric supernatural sleuth being intrigued. “Why did you say that, Noah?” 

Noah tilted his head. “Because it was true…  I’ve been existing out of order since I died,” Noah said. Ronan rolled his eyes. This again. It was like a running joke that Noah kept trying to force, but no one – including himself – seemed to find it funny. “But it’s you guys that are out of order.” 

“Noah,” Gansey said, criminally patient. “We still don’t understand what you’re saying.”  

Noah huffed, frustrated. It was a strange emotion on him.  

“One thing happens,” Noah said, chopping his right hand down on his left palm. “And then another.” He chopped again. “Then another, another, another.” A series of chops, just increments apart. “But you guys... Certain things are supposed to have happen already. But they haven’t. Instead you’re doing other things. It’s...” He ran his cold hands over his face. “It’s confusing.”  

“This bullshit is confusing,” Ronan agreed. He plopped down on the couch, a resignation. He too rubbed hands over face. “But that psychic lady said it too.” 

“Twice is just one short of a pattern,” Gansey said.  

“Three times,” Ronan interrupted. “I… saw another psychic.” 

Noah stood. “It’s okay,” he said with a sigh. “I know you don’t believe me. We’re not in the part of the story that you believe me yet.”  

They watched him disappear into his room. Gansey raised his eyebrows; Ronan lowered his. 

“Are you going to enlighten me about this second psychic visit?” Gansey asked of Ronan. 

“No,” Ronan said. Because he didn’t understand it himself enough to be fucking enlightening. 

“Well then,” Gansey said, adjusting his glasses. “I have something to tell you. Remember that valley Henry Cheng pointed me towards.” 

“No,” Ronan said. 

“I told you about it,” Gansey said, leaning his tone onto the word ‘told.’ “I’ve been trying to get visitation permission… You’re shitting with me, aren’t you?”

“No,” Ronan said. 

Gansey rolled his eyes. “Well, don’t get weekend detention --” 

“Like I’d go --”

“Because I got those visitation permissions. Helen’s bringing a helicopter down from DC… I was thinking of inviting Blue. Do you think I should invite Blue?”

Helicopter. What helicopter? This helicopter.

“Yes,” Ronan said, fast and blunt, and his mind had already raced off to the next point. “Can I invite someone too?” 

“Who do you have to invite?” Gansey asked, too shocked to realize how rude he was being. 

“You’ll see… Everything… Fuck. I think it might be coming together.” 

 

#

 

“What’re you doing here?” Adam asked Ronan the second time that day. “You just left. I haven’t even had a chance to leave yet.”

They were standing in the bare apartment above St. Agnes Catholic Church. The apartment that Ronan had introduced Adam to because he had gone to St. Agnes his entire life, including last Sunday when they made an announcement about its vacancy and availability. Adam asked for help; Ronan happened to have an answer. Fate aligned yet again and again and again. 

Then Ronan had left to interrogate Noah, and now here he was, back again. 

Adam turned around on the spot, scratching his head. “I’m just trying to think about what I need to be able to live here.”

Ronan said, “Do you want to come on a helicopter ride next Saturday?”

Adam stopped turning. “A helicopter ride?” 

“Don’t ask,” Ronan said, because Gansey and his adventures were so hard to example without him there to serve as an exhibit. Then he realized that it was a pretty big request to follow up with a ‘don’t ask.’

“Okay,” Adam said. “I’ll go. I mean, sounds fucking terrifying, but when else am I going to get to ride in a helicopter?” 

“After you graduate college,” Ronan said. “And get a great job like a huge fucking nerd.” 

“Right,” Adam said, voice a little hollow. He looked at the floor, then the ceiling, and then right at Ronan. Maybe he had been avoiding looking at Ronan because of what he did next. Maybe it was like magnetism. Maybe it was his self-improvement kick. Maybe it was him listening to fate. Maybe it was hearing someone remember the dreams he had confessed and repeat them back with such confidence. Maybe it was being believed in. Maybe it was all that stirred up with all the other things that had happened these last weeks, months. 

Because Adam stepped forward and kissed Ronan. This wasn’t a dream.   


	12. Chapter 12

Adam stepped back, wringing his hands. 

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. 

“No, it was fine,” Ronan said.  

Fine? Motherfucking fine! What words were coming out of Ronan Lynch’s mouth right now, and how they were goddamn failing him. He said fine. The kiss was fine. Being kissed was fine. Like it wasn’t just a first, new, explosive experience. Like it wasn’t a culmination -- tension fulfilled. Like Ronan Lynch hadn’t just felt his metaphysical concept of a soul -- which many doubted existed -- lift from his body.  _ Fine.  _

“It was nice. I mean, I liked it. Fuck.”

Adam snorted. 

Ronan said, “Don’t laugh!” 

Adam ran a hand over his forehead, over his hair, making the mess of it messier and also making Ronan’s mouth go dry. 

“Shit,” Adam said. “Neither of us know what we’re doing.” 

“Was it that bad?” Ronan said. 

Adam’s brow wrinkled. “What?”

“The kiss?”

“No, not the kiss. That was -- that was…” His word hissed out. 

“What?” Ronan prodded. 

“It was -- it’s not…” Lost for words, Adam stepped up and kissed Ronan again.

Ronan was a little more ready this time. His hands found Adam’s waist, fisted his fingers in the fabric of his shirt, and held him close. He found a better angle for his head than last time, pressed in more, made sure his opinion was know -- he liked this. Wanted this. Wanted this to continue. 

Being more prepared this time, less shocked, he had a chance to zoom in on the physical sensations. The warmth of lips. The ghosts of breathing being fit in wherever possible. The shape of the hands cupping his neck. Heartbeat against heartbeat. 

“This is a bad idea,” Adam said, but this time he had only pulled back -- what?, a centimeter? Their foreheads touched. 

“It’s the fucking best bad idea I’ve ever had,” Ronan replied. He pushed his chin forward, chasing and catching another brush of lips, but Adam Parrish was nothing if not persistent. He needed to get his words out, make his case be heard. 

“Talk,” Ronan grunted, but curled his hands in Adam’s shirt tighter. He didn’t want to untwine. 

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me,” Adam said. “The person I was when I was dating Kavinsky… that’s not who I am. That was a… a bad turn.” 

“Noted,” Ronan said. They bumped noses. 

“Listen,” Adam insisted. He pulled back now this time several inches. His hands, though, were still on Ronan’s shoulders; Ronan’s were still had his sides. 

“No, you listen,” Ronan said. “If you think the reason I want to kiss you right now because of the person you were with Joseph Motherfucking Kavinsky, you’re a lot stupider than I thought you were. Got it, loser?” 

Adam blinked. “You’re an asshole,” he said, and then they were kissing again, so it was all alright.

 

#

 

“You know Kavinsky likes you,” Adam said. 

This really wasn’t the thing Ronan preferred to have on the mind at the moment, but he was also highly suggestable in his post-kissed phase, so he gave Adam the answer he seeked. 

“I know.”

“You know that he knew about you and me, and our thing. Our… connection.” The thing it was before the thing it was now, what it had becoming. The dream of kissing before the physical reality of it. 

“I know,” Ronan said. “He made a fucking point of it.” 

Adam nodded once. “He’s not going to take it well when he finds out that we’re actually… doing… this.”

“This,” Ronan repeated, like it was a word full of scintillation. “Are you worried?”

“I’ve faced scarier things that Joseph Kavinsky,” Adam said, and in a reactionary, itchy way Ronan scanned Adam’s face for bruises, but it was for once clean of them. 

“When we broke up,” Adam continued, “The worse it went to was name calling, and he does that when he’s in a good mood too. So I don’t think I’m scared of him, but I don’t know what he’ll do. He takes all his shit out on the world.” Adam shook his head, distracted by a thought. “That was one of the ways were were different.”

“You’re different in all the ways,” Ronan scoffed. 

“No,” Adam said, shaking his head again, a little divot forming between his eyebrows. “In most ways, yes. But as messed up as we’re together, we understood each other... We both know what it’s was like to have parents who didn’t love us.”  

At that moment, Ronan wanted to set fire to the world just to avenge the boy who could sit in front of him and say that curse so matter-of-factly 

“And he tries to take that pain out on the world, and I just try to make myself better… like I can prove them fucking wrong.” Adam ducked his head. “You can’t change someone who doesn’t want to change. You can’t be good enough or understanding enough or suffer enough.” He raked his teeth over his bottom lip. The bottom edge of it was flaked with chapped skin. Ronan had felt it when they’ve been mouth to mouth. 

He wondered if Adam was talking of the home where he had lived with parents who left regular bruises on him as well as the recent ex-boyfriend. 

“Hell,” Adam said, “We were making out and now we’re talking about about this shit. I told you I didn’t know what I was doing.  It’s just… you go to school with him. It’s a small town. K’s something that we’re going to have to deal with in the future… I mean, if this goes into the future.”

“That’s my plan,” Ronan said, fast and easy and sure. 

Ronan didn’t understand a lot about dating, but he got the impression there was a lot of dancing around, testing the temperature of the water, not daring to say what you mean. All the subtle things that were very opposed to Ronan Lynch’s blunt nature. He had decided he wasn’t going to do it. 

If he got hurt, he got hurt. He’s dealt with hurt. He wasn’t going to go for not doing and not saying. That was just a prolonged sort of safe pain. That wasn’t Ronan Lynch’s game. 

“Are you worried?” Adam asked him. “About K?”

Ronan rolled his neck on his shoulders. He thought, should he tell? Then he decided he shoulder. 

“Here’s the fucking biggest thing you don’t know about me,” Ronan said. “About a year ago… my dad was murdered.” 

God, he never had to talk about this before. People just… knew. Rumors spread this like an infection. His father was murdered. A year and a bunch of weeks ago now. His father was murdered, and Ronan Lynch had been living with with fucking nuclear fall out ever since. 

There was so much more to this story. That his father was murdered was just the beginning. There was Ronan finding that body. There was Mom. There was pain, nightmares, and the scars under his leather bracelets.

His father was murdered, and he had just said it out loud, and Adam was looking at his with the silent pain and horror it deserved. Adam was also smart enough to not ask all the questions that Ronan wasn’t prepared to answer. He had just opened the wound a little; he wasn’t prepared to gore himself. 

It was this pain that had driven him to Kavinsky’s back at its anniversary -- the night he had first met Adam. How strange fate had twisted them.  

Ronan coughed. He had been saying something. “I’ve dealt with a lot fucking scarier things than Joseph Kavinsky too.” 

 

#

 

“I’m going to vomit,” Adam said as the helicopter lifted from the ground, giving a weird sense of weightlessness that human bodies, designed to stay on the ground, shouldn’t have. 

“Do it that way,” Ronan said, with the curt nod in the opposite direction from him to where Blue was sitting on the other side of Adam. Still, Ronan squeezed Adam’s hand where he held it between their knees. Adam squeezed back harder.  

As the helicopter reached height over the trees and hills, it plunged into forward motion. Gansey whooped into his headset. 

Ronan had guessed right about the two of them, Adam and Gansey. That they were both fucking nerds who would nerd together over history and Ivy League colleges. Gansey was always eager for disciples into the ways of Glendower. Of Gansey, Adam seemed to annoyed by and charmed with him in equal measure. Blue Sargent seemed to feel the same. That was the way of it. 

After a while, they landed in a spot that Gansey had “a feeling about” and convinced his sister, the pilot, that all they needed was fifteen minutes. The group of them walked out into the forest, Gansey with a electromagnetic reader in hand. They walked for what was either five minutes or an hour, until the sun was straight overheard like noon even though it had been two in the afternoon when they had taken flight, until the wind through the trees was like whispers, and leaves made of book pages rained down. 

Ronan’s knuckles brushed the back of Adam’s as they walked side by side. Adam caught his eye. 

“This is…” he said, sliver of a sound. 

Ronan removed a book page leaf from Adam’s hair. “I know,” he said. He was even having a harder time believing it. He had been coming to this forest in his dreams for as long as he could remember. His entire life practically. And it was here. In the real world. Here. Outside of Henrietta. Not that far. 

This impossible thing was possible. 

“What do you know?” Gansey called back from the front of the group. Ronan went lock-lipped. He had coerced a promise from Gansey not that long ago -- that he believe Ronan when the time came for revelations. 

But it was too much to drop at once. That he had been in this forest before. A lot. In his head. In his dreams. And that Adam had been there too. And that Ronan could draw things out of his dreams, and so, too, apparently, could Joseph Goddamn Kavinsky. Even better than Ronan it turned out. And yes, some of these secrets were fresh and new, and others he had held from before he had even met Richard Campbell Gansey the Third. 

It would’ve been like dropping a bag of bricks into a bathtub. Most of the water would’ve splashed out. He needed to ease the truth in slowly, brick by brick. Being here was a first step. Being here was as new of a magical revelation to him as it was to everyone else here. 

“That this is fucking crazy,” Ronan said, a diversion. His tone held the truth of his wonder though. 

Gansey suspected more. Ronan could fucking tell by the inquisitive slope his eyebrows shaped, but then Blue grabbed him by the sleeve and distracted him by pointing out some new discovery that Ronan couldn’t even manage to notice as his nerves were up and fucking frazzled. 

“How many secrets do you have?” Adam asked in an undertone after this whole display. 

Ronan countered, “How high can you count?” 

The thing it turned out Blue and Gansey had discovered was a strange little fish pond settled into the middle of a flowing stream where the fish darted like quicksilver and seemed to change color as soon as you looked away for a second but none of them could be sure. Couldn’t be sure that it was not a trick of light, or refracted water, or their own memories failing them. 

After they spent a good deal of time debating and discussing this in their little foursome, Gansey stopped to announce: “We should be heading back soon. I told Helen ten minutes.” He glanced at his wrist watch. His brow furrowed. “My watch stopped.” 

“Mine too,” Adam said, checking his own. Neither Blue nor Ronan wore watches because they didn’t fit into their laissez-faire fashion choices so they couldn’t confirm whether this was an odd coincidence or they had stepped into the twilight zone. 

“Either way…” Gansey said, although his voice was sticky and resistant. Ronan knew him too well. He knew Gansey longed to stay here and investigate more. He had been going through months of a discovery dryspell after making his way to Henrietta, the land of the ley line, and now he had to leave. 

“We can always come back,” Blue said from Gansey’s side, and Ronan only barely noticed her finger touch the inside of Gansey’s wrist in a brief but intimate touch. Hell, he wasn’t the only one who knew something of the stuff of Gansey anymore it seemed. 

Gansey’s jaw clenched as he nodded. 

Ronan’s mind skipped from this scene to a hypothetical one -- a ponderance. What would it be like to touch Adam over the veins of his inner wrists, to press his lips to that sensitive spot and cause a shiver through the both of them. 

Back in reality, Adam had wandered away from the group. Ronan may have spent many years in his dreams here, but that just meant he was well-versed enough in this place not to trust it. 

“Don’t go getting lost there, Parrish,” Ronan said, calling at his back as he took a few long strides his way. 

Adam was quiet as Ronan came to stand beside him. He was squinting. 

“Adam?” he asked under his breath. 

Adam squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide. “Can you tell me if you see it too?” 

“See what?” 

Adam raised an arm and pointed out through the trees and underbrush. “Is that a car?” 

Indeed, there was a gleam of unnatural bright red that could’ve been the shape of a some slick auto. 

“It’s a mustang,” said a voice like the breeze. 

Ronan nearly jumped out of his skin. “Jesus, Noah,” he said, giving a stink eye to his friend and roommate who had just slipped up beside him. It was hard to sneak in a forest. Every footstep usually crunched something. “Make a fucking noise when you move. Don’t just show up out of fucking nowhere.” 

“How can you tell?” Adam asked Noah, like he knew Noah. He did, right? Ronan had introduced them back when he had introduced Gansey and Adam? This morning, before the helicopter. He couldn’t exactly remember it, but he would’ve had to. It was the only slippery notion that made sense. 

“Because I know,” Noah replied. 

Having finally caught up, Gansey said, “I guess we can spare five more minutes.” 

So the group of them tramped off to investigate this new mystery into this already pre-existing Russian nesting doll of mysteries. 

“It looks like it’s been here a while,” Blue said, dragging a finger through the grim and pollen that dusted the whole shiny machine once they had made it close enough to touch. 

“It is a mustang,” Ronan said, outlining the shape of the galloping horse on the front grill with his own fingers. “We’ll have to tell Noah when we get back.”

“Shame he couldn’t come,” Gansey said.   

Adam blinked. “But…” 

“Yeah?” Ronan asked him. 

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” 

With regret and confusion from all four of them, they started back in the direction they best thought they came from. All worry washed away when the walk out of the forest proceeded a lot faster than the one in. 

As there were leaving, Ronan could swear he heard words caught in the rustle of leaves and whisper of breeze. Words in Latin. Words that roughly translated to, “Welcome back.”

 

#

 

Helen chastised them for taking too long, but her version of too long was way too short and lenient compared to the intense time they were sure they spent in the forest. The four of them were quiet over their headsets as they flew back to the field from which they had launched. They had a lot to say but even more to think about. It wasn’t like this could have a conversation with Helen there without sounding insane. What they had seen needed to be witnessed. 

That was the nature of secrets. Some you kept to protect yourself. Some you kept to protect others. And some you kept because no one would believe you if you told, not if they weren’t part of it themselves.    

Landed, they huddled around their cars parked on the edge of the field. Gansey drummed out a beat on the hood of the car, an extension of restless energy. “We got a lot to talk about,” he said. “Who’s in for gelato and a debrief?” 

“Me,” Ronan said. He nudged Adam with an elbow. 

“Well, you’re my ride,” Adam said. 

“Can’t,” Blue said. “My mom needs me for psychic business.” 

“But you’re not psychic,” Gansey said.  

“Doesn’t matter tonight… I’m surprised you don’t know, Gansey. It’s St. Mark’s Eve.” 

#

 

In a brief moment when Gansey was alone with Ronan while Adam had disappeared to the bathroom, Gansey asked, “Are and you Adam…?” 

Thing is Gansey and Ronan could always communicate beyond words. 

“Yeah,” Ronan said. 

Gansey nodded like everything in his brain was clunking into place. “Cool,” he said, and held out a fist. Ronan rolled his eyes and shoved him in the arm. 

 

#

 

“So this is the place…” Ronan scuffed the edge of his boot along the floor. It had been a few days since he had first been standing in this apartment about St. Agnes, having introduced it to Adam, having Adam kiss him maybe in this very spot. Ronan shifted over a footstep. This spot, he thinks. 

“It’s a work in progress,” Adam said. The place was still very empty, but showed the shallow signs of a move in: sheets on the bed, clothes on the floor, and school books on the crates plus plywood combo that was serving as a table. “But it’s… It’s mine.” He said ‘mine’ like it was a thing of wonder, like how little kids said ‘Disneyland.’ 

Ronan wanted to step forward and say, ‘Me too. I’m yours.’ He didn’t. That was awful fucking bold. They may have kissed before, in dreams and in reality, but this was still all new territory, even more so for Ronan than Adam. How did you act around someone you had kissed before? That you desired to kiss now? That you couldn’t stop thinking about kissing? 

He had driven Adam home from gelato and now he didn’t know what to do with himself. 

“You okay over there?” Adam voice cut through Ronan’s torrent of thoughts. 

Ronan lifted his head. “Fucking peachy,” he said, with no heat. 

Adam sat down on the edge of his bed and folded his hands in his lap; Ronan sat nowhere at all. He stood, instead, in the middle of the floor.

Adam said, “Can I ask you something that is probably going to sound stupid?” 

“Shoot.” 

Adam’s eyebrows wrinkled in. “When did I meet Noah?” 

“Today, loser,” Ronan said. 

“He wasn’t at gelato,” Adam said.

Ronan crossed his arms. “That was just you, me, and Gansey.” 

“He was in the forest.” 

“Yeah,” Ronan agreed.  

“Was he on the helicopter?”

Ronan opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again. “He… had be. To get there.”

“I know that’s the only thing that makes sense,” Adam said. “But do you remember him being on the helicopter?”

“Shit. No... But I was distracted.” 

“By what?”

Ronan felt heat rise up his neck. “By your hand.” 

“By my…?” 

Ronan finally braved himself up enough to sit down next to Adam on the bed. He lifted Adam’s hand, playing with the fingers with his fingers. He lifted it higher, and pressed his mouth to the inside of Adam’s wrist. Adam released a shuddering breath. 

“What’re you doing?” 

Ronan shifted his mouth just enough to talk but not enough that his lips lost full contact with soft skin. “Distracting you.” 

Adam pulled his hand free, but only so he could grab Ronan by the shoulders and press their hungry mouths together. 

For Ronan Lynch, for so long he had felt like he was about to itch out of his skin. This had started before his father had died, but that certainly had expedited it when the one satisfying role he had filled as brother-son in the powerhouse Lynch family had been ripped from him along with everything that entailed. When he had lost his father, his mother, and somehow his oldest brother too in a vicious fell swoop, he had lost the only stabilizing parts of who he was and was left with just the tangled painful and confusing parts. 

So, he had tried to make his skin something satisfying to live in. He shaved his hair, got the spread of a tattoo needled onto his back, wore mourning black, and let his language and actions be as vicious and miserable as he felt inside. He drank fast, drove fast, punched fast -- or he had -- all in desperate and failing hopes to outrun the warring notions bottled within his ribcage. 

This moment, however, wrapped up with Adam Parrish in a cold, stone apartment above St. Agnes, mouth to mouth, hands wandering, and breathing so close who knew what was one or the other anymore, Ronn Lynch felt settled in his own body. Like he was supposed to be here, for once, existing. 

After some time, like dream time, that passed in that impossible to measure way, he felt Adam’s blunt fingernails drag down the side of his face as he pulled his mouth away. Adam’s fingers moved over to Ronan’s mouth, to touch whatever his lips must’ve looked like after being intensely kissed.  

After a lingering moment, Adam’s hand dropped away. 

“We were talking about something,” he said, “Before you distracted me.” His brow scrunched. “What was it?”

“Fuck if I know,” Ronan said.

Adam sat there, brow still scrunched. Ronan tried to set his brain back to just a few minutes ago but he couldn’t make it reach. And what was there was as flimsy as sand. 

“I’m sure I’ll remember eventually,” Adam said.  “It’s not like me to forget stuff. He shrugged his shoulders. “When I’m sober.” 

Ronan snorted. 

Adam shoved his shoulder. “I’m serious.” 

“Too serious.” 

“You like that though.”

“Yeah. I fucking do.” 

For a moment, right here, things felt at peace. 

Adam drew in a big breath through his nose. “This feels like the beginning of something, doesn’t it?” 

Ronan couldn’t say that Adam was wrong, but he also couldn’t explain in any significant words what he meant. 

Adam went on: “Dreams. Psychics. The forest. Dead Welsh Kings… This all has to mean something. Has to… come together. Things like this don’t just happened to normal people.”

“I never said I thought you were normal,” Ronan countered. 

“Like you’re the peak of normalcy.”

“Nah. Fuck normal.” 

Adam scoffed this time. 

“You understand what I’m saying, right?” 

Ronan ducked his head and thought. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “It’s like…” The words came to him as firm at a brick to the head. “Everything is in order.” 

Ronan Lynch didn’t know what was to come, but he knew it was coming. An adventure, he thought. Or a nightmare. Or a little of both. 

But it was coming. Things were changing. ‘Transition’ that second crazy psychic had said. ‘Necessary but painful.’

He thought of his roommate-friends back at Monmouth -- Gansey and Noah -- and of his newish sort-of-friend Blue. He looked at the boy sitting right next to him whom he had met on a miserable night through the unlikeliest of intermediaries -- Joseph Hellfire Kavinsky. He had found a forest from his dreams and has had his first kiss, and the next few after that. 

So, yes, things were changing. Ronan Lynch was changing. But -- he leaned forward to kiss Adam Parrish, the boy who had walked in his dreams, on the mouth -- it wasn’t completely painful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... I hope this ending didn't feel too abrupt for anyone, but I felt this was the right place without dragging it out. It was about getting to the place where the rest of the story of the Raven Cycle can begin. 
> 
> If you enjoyed this and you haven't checked out my other Pynch fics, please do. This was an "interesting" fic to write because I have about 10,000 plus words of discarded material that didn't make it in because the story changed and it no longer fic. Le sigh. 
> 
> Until next time...

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr as ungoodgatsby
> 
> find me on twitter @themargerybayne
> 
> check out my original writing at www.margerybayne.com


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